Baseboards Used to Be Difficult

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and if you only take one tip from this entire video always glue your outside miters before nailing them on i will have more information on that gluing your outside miters but i wanted to do this video in chronological order starting at the very beginning and right here i have a bunch of sapili that was custom milled for me by creative woodworking northwest and this tip one is finish your baseboards first and this goes for painted or stained and the only exception i could see to this is if the house was unfinished and you could go in with a say a spray gun and spray the whole thing and not worry about getting on the floors or the walls same goes for stain polyurethane or whatever finish you're gonna use if you could spray it on without having to worry about the walls then that's okay but otherwise i always say finish your baseboards before installing them probably the most frustrating part of installing baseboards or door trim or crown molding is that walls are not flat and the corners are not square there is probably no 90 degree corners in my entire house they're always going to be off by a degree or two and so how do you find the angle to cut and this is how you find it this is a tool i just discovered from steret this is not an angle finder but it tells you which miter to cut and what you do is you put it up on your wall and then when you look closely it will show you right at about 46 degrees and so what this means is you make two cuts at 46 degrees meaning each corner you're going to cut at 46. you don't have to do any math and i know that these gauges are not that accurate but they are going to be accurate enough for our walls we aren't building a piano this is going to be close enough for us so i put the first one in at 46 moved it over cut the other one at the same 46 degrees and then did my test fit and sure enough bang on this is a quick tip but it is really valuable it's not always possible with the 16 foot boards but on these short pieces bring it right over to the wall and mark exactly where that miter needs to be cut and that way you don't have to worry about the inaccuracies of a tape measure of all the mistakes people make installing baseboards i feel like the worst one the most noticeable one is when they have a bad outside miter when you walk by and from eye level you can see that gap in the corner and that is why this is my favorite trick of all the ones we're going to talk about today i am just using ca glue also known as super glue and it sets up just that fast in a few seconds and it makes a really really surprisingly strong joint and it works on mdf as well as solid wood you can see this one i was doing both sides of it first almost lost it you only have a couple seconds to get it before it hardens and if it does harden it's okay you can scrape it off and do it over again but there you go that means you are going to have a perfect outside miter and it's going to stay perfect when you start nailing it in when you start bumping into it it's going to maintain that perfect outside joint this next tip is for when you are completely stumped on how are you going to find a certain angle and what i noticed here was i have this huge gap underneath this particular joint because where the concrete meets the hardwood it dove off at a pretty aggressive angle so i made the first cut at that transition point at the concrete and then i used my sliding t-bevel and it's not going to give you your angle in number form and first of all i know i'm using this backwards you can save the comments this is how i was able to get the most accurate reading on that long section of hardwood anyway it is not going to give you the angled number but it's going to give you the exact angle that you want and you'll see here i probably should have used a 45 degree end end joint but this joint ended up pretty tight so it wasn't too bad in the end but it got the perfect contour the perfect shape the perfect angle whatever you want to call it so that you couldn't even tell on that transition from the concrete to the hardwood that example was a pretty extreme example of when you can use a sliding t-bevel hopefully your house doesn't have any transitions that bad however this is probably a more likely example that you'll run into where that vertical case just isn't sitting at a perfect 90 and instead of making a bunch of cuts and a bunch of guesses we can do is bring this sliding t-bevel over and yes this is how it's supposed to be used and just line that blade up right there with the gauge make your cut and then come back and this one wasn't perfect but it was a lot better than you saw there at the start while i was doing all hardwood stain grade baseboards throughout my house i realized that most of you guys watching this are going to be doing paint grade and a lot of you using mdf so for this big budget production i went to home depot and i spent like six dollars of my own money and i got a small section of mdf just to show you this next tip and if you want to help reimburse me for this i don't want your money all i want from you is if you are enjoying this if you've got anything out of it hit that like button right now hit that subscribe button because that's what enables me to keep making more videos just like this one a lot of you are probably wondering why you can't just do 45 degree miters on the inside joints and i've had to explain to me a few times by finished carpenters and i can never seem to articulate it quite as well as they do so if you are a finnish carpenter and you want to leave a comment below with a thorough explanation i will pin that at the top comment so anybody who is curious and has that question can reference that very quickly but the bottom line is you aren't allowed to use inside miters that is what amateurs do all the pros cope and here is how i cope i used this cutsall flamber in my makita die grinder and this was my first attempt i am not a professional finished carpenter but i was able to get a really pretty good joint on my very first try the only coping i had to do was on the small radius of this little cap and it was actually kind of tricky because it was such a tight little radius with the straight portion but here is how it fit in the end something else that often gets overlooked is when people are choosing the size of their baseboards versus their casing and you can see there that is the new baseboard with a new casing and here's what it would look like if i had the same thickness baseboard as casing and that just doesn't look good there's that gap there that one looks very slick the baseboard ends right into the vertical casing and here's how they were originally and they were all three quarter inch they had a funny transition and they didn't fit really flush against the wall and so that brings me to my next tip is consider putting a cap on your baseboards i really don't know why caps aren't the standard and i guess the reason would be it's just more work and more money but i think they make so much of a difference when it comes to having that really professional look and first of all i do like the profile of this cap and they make all kinds of different caps but the main thing that i love about it is that it contours to the wall i wish i would have got a video of this before i put this up because the old baseboard had like a half inch gap behind it and i tried to show you just how crooked the wall was that's not distortion of the camera lens the wall is actually that crooked but there are no gaps because that cap completely contours to the wall the entire way and if you remember that transition from the concrete to the hardwoods i was able to use the cap to just gently bend it over that transition so i didn't have to make any of those sliding t-bevel cuts and it is completely seamless a lot of us including myself tend to abuse this next tip and that is using a screwdriver to round over your edges and even if you don't have a gap it is still nice to ease the edges because you don't want a perfect sharp sharp 90 degree that you're going to stub your toe on or have it chipped if someone's boot hits it so i was closing up that small little gap there with the screwdriver but i was also just kind of rounding over the edge just to make it wear a little bit better and make it a little less hazardous and this tip gets used a lot to close some huge gaps and i'll show you in a little bit i closed a pretty big gap with it and for this stain grade i had to add a little bit more finish onto it and then just wipe it off one thing to keep in mind when you're doing your own baseboards is don't get too frustrated like right now this doesn't look great i'm eye level with it i got a macro lens i got a photography light on it you see every possible flaw but you gotta remember you're gonna be five to six feet off the ground you're not staring right at it you don't know exactly where the nail holes are so after i ease these over add a little bit of finish filled the nails it looks pretty decent so don't worry too much about it which brings me to tip number nine and that is filling your nail holes first of all always fill your nail holes that's the first tip don't forget it don't think that you won't notice because that is something else you will notice from eye level and i do have some tips for you paint grade people but first here is how i filled my nail holes and i ended up using these wax sticks and some guys i've seen just kind of mash them in there but that leaves kind of a waxy halo anywhere that wax touches so what i did was i got the finest little screwdriver that i could find and i like to mix a couple colors because wood grain has variation in the color so i like to just kind of mix a couple of them together and then try to get as little as possible directly into the hole scrape it off buff it with a cotton cloth and another trick that i found worked really well is if the color was a little light i would come back with a furniture marker and just kind of make a little couple speckles and i don't know if they're invisible but they're pretty good there are wax filler sticks that require a heat gun to be heated up or a torch to heat it up before you put it in and they probably are a little bit harder in terms of a harder finish but these seem to work just fine and i was able to just buff them off with a cotton cloth the furniture marker was very handy and i tended to aim a little bit light on my nail holes because then i could come back with a marker and kind of blend them in whereas if i went too dark then it was going to be hard to blend them back to that lighter color i didn't even think about the fact that i am actually colorblind and didn't run these colors by my wife before doing them so hopefully there's not a bunch of purple dots up there that are really standing out to everybody right now but i feel like my wife probably would have mentioned something if the colors didn't match although maybe she wouldn't anyway i have not forgot about you paint grade people here is what you don't want to do don't use caulk to fill your nail holes it is the lazy man's way the will shrink it will emphasize the size of those nail holes it will look awful what you want to use is this automotive bondo and it's like nine dollars for a big tub it's super cheap you only have about five minutes of working time for each batch you mix up and i didn't go really that clean with it here it was a little bit sloppy so you can do a little bit better job but the nice thing about the bondo is it sands like wood it sounds so smooth that you just add a little bit more touch-up paint and it will be completely invisible here is another tip i just saw this week from brad fix this build that it is just applying painters tape before you shoot your nails and then you can come back with whatever nail filler you're going to use be as sloppy as you want peel it off and it barely leaves the mark at all pretty slick brad and if you ever feel bad about the quality of your work come back and watch this tick tock video i saw this week because this person was actually trying to teach people how to do it they were proud of this that was not a joke all right this week start your question or comment with your guess of what my middle name is and the first person who i don't know that guess is correct i will send you something super cool i don't know what it is yet but i promise i will make it worth your while

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,589,832

Keywords: base, baseboard, diy, easy, brad nailer, carpenter, carpentry, coping, coping saw, do it yourself, finish, how to, inside corner, mdf, mitre saw, outside corner, returns, trim, wood, woodworking, how to install baseboards, modern baseboards, base molding, how to cope baseboard molding, baseboard tips and tricks, diy baseboards

Id: UuKYaBHlj60

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021