Baseboard Removal The Best Way

hi this is James with that home service and repair with your tech tip for the day today I'm going to be working with baseboards I'm happy to be taking my own baseboards off today for this project because so many times unfortunately I get to a project like this and somebody has elected to take the baseboards off themselves to save a little bit of money or what have you and I often find these stacked in a pile in the garage no attempt has been made to mark them or clean them up they've got nails sticking out of them still caulking sticking on the you know all over the piece so what I want to do is I want to show you just a couple of things that I do when I get ready to start a job I will I'll remove the baseboard and which I'm going to do in this next part once I have the baseboard off I'm just going to take my five and one scraper and I'm going to take the caulk off of the back we're going to scrape too hard this MDF board is pretty soft so I'm going to scrape scrape it off to the back here and then I'm going to take a razor knife I'm going to very gently just plane that off of the top like that be careful because this should be sharp and then around my mitered corners you see there's usually a little bit of caulk right through here so I'm going to take my knife and I'm going to just very gently pull that and clean that up last thing I'm going to do after I've taken the nails out is I'm going to take a file and just shave off this little flow out section on the back here where the notch where the nails creates a little bit of a mountain this is what it looks like I know if you can see that see it's sticking up a little bit right there so I'll just take a file knock that down and for the thirty seconds that I have taken to just clean this board up a little bit it is now ready to go on alright now the next thing I'm going to do very quickly here is I'm going to show you a couple of techniques for taking the board off of the wall these boards are soft they can split easily there's usually caulk along the top edge and if you just go ripping them off with a pry bar you can damage the board you can pull the paint off of the wall as the caulking that's holding onto the board lifts the layer of paper and paint and texture that was there so when you put it back it's ugly well I'm going to show you how to avoid that next let's pretend that this baseboard is still here and what I did is I just take a took my utility knife and I just very carefully and gently worked it into the mitered corner here so I could separate the klog from the next board then take your utility knife and hold it flush and kind of push a little bit of pressure up against the wall here what you're trying to do is you're trying to take that blade in between the baseboard and the wall without cutting the wall you see I'm going to take this blade right down through the caulking joiner not a lot of call back here now that I've separated the caulk joints from my adjoining pieces and the top of the wall what's next how do I get this how do I get this big ugly pry bar in here without damaging my paint this technique works really well if I've got a very tight fit I can use my five in one and I'll just put the beveled edge down and just kind of slide it underneath there and then lift it up and once I get that little bit of purchase I can now get my big ugly strong pry bar and lift it up like this what I'm doing is I'm just lifting the board and that's of course it's bending the nails a little bit it's also making it very easy for me to get this piece out now here I can just take my pry bar and without touching the wall give it a little twist and put my piece freed up there's always a couple right down there at the end if I pull out as I go here's what I've got I'll have these little nails sticking out of the walls here so I'm going to either they're really short and usually right into up 2x4 take my mouth flashing like so very carefully check along here don't get too excited when you move your hand along here because you will if you find a short nail you can open up your skin you're not wearing gloves like me now I'm just going to take my little five in one this is a good five in one it's made out of chrome steel so it doesn't really mark the wall up you know if I scrape along there I want to I want to read that top into that wall just as intact as possible so now I thought I've got my nails off of the wall I've got my wall edge rips there's another nail have that back in they see I've got my raw edge cleaned up the next thing to do is clean up my my base molding and this is a good time to have a little felt tip marker with you and I don't have a felt tip marker let's pretend I do I'm going to I'm going to number these baseboards around the room one at a time and I'm just going to work in this case I'm working counterclockwise so the first one is number one this one is happens to be let's just say this is number five so I'm going to put a 5 here and a 5 here now if I end up with these baseboards off the location like out in the garage and a pile I can pick them up very quickly at the end of the job and go lay them out to the corresponding numbers in the room so when I come back obviously the only thing I have to do is put it into place nail it and caulk it and I'm done so when I come back I'm going to show you how to put these board put these babies back on and then call them back into place so that they look like they've never been taken off of the wall that's the idea okay see you later you

Channel: FlowmotionStudios

Views: 205,671

Rating: 4.9013867 out of 5

Keywords: 5-31-16 Baseboards

Id: fhfUS1LHxnI

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2016