How to install baseboard for beginners

good day everybody and thanks for coming back i appreciate it so today we're talking baseboard and i'm going to go over a whole bunch of just general information about the baseboard itself as well as some tips and tricks installing and finishing hopefully by the time we're done you guys will be armed with all the information you need to do a great job in your own house and save a crap ton of money by not having to hire somebody to come do it for you now when it comes to your baseboard there's usually three different kinds you can get you can get plastic which i don't recommend it is very cheap very poorly made you get mdf which is what i have here been using it for years in my house i used it all the time when i was building homes and condos it's by far the most common and popular type of board that you're going to find and you can also get real wood base and trim as well now there are people out there that will publicly chastise you and rake you over the coals if you don't use the real wood stuff and it is honestly it looks fantastic and it has its place but if you don't have a house that suits that kind of base honestly it's not worth the money it there's by far more expensive and if all you're going to do is paint it white anyway there's no point to it because it's going to end up looking exactly the same as mdf sorry for your base as well you can also get profiled stuff which has that really nice router design on it and you can get flat stock stuff like this right here when it comes to thicknesses this is half inch right here you can get three quarter inch as well five eighths you can get different thicknesses this is half inch that's perfectly fine it's very common and when it comes to the height of the board or how tall it is again something around two and a half inch up to usually six seven inches is going to be the tallest you can get but by far the most common at least nowadays is three and a half which is what this stuff is right here you can find this pretty pretty commonly basically every big hardware store and one nice thing i like about this flat stock stuff it's a lot easier to install than the profiled stuff because they don't have to try and match profile it makes it simpler in the corners which i'll show you in a sec but you can also find the stuff in big bundles i bought this stuff it's a big value pack you can buy at the store it's eight there's ten eight foot sections all wrapped together so it's basically 80 feet for 40 bucks can't go wrong now before we even think about putting this stuff on the wall you're going to want to pre-finish it now 99 of the time your baseboard is just going to come pre-primed in the store but you need need to put at least one coat of your trim paint on your board before you put it on the wall this right here i just did it with a small little four inch roller and a tray painted my side painted my side painted the face called it good now your paint usually on your baseboard again traditionally is going to be just a pure white paint it's going to be either a satin or a semi-gloss finish i have semi-gloss right here in pure white and that's it but again you can do whatever you please now we can finally start installing and it's usually going to start at an inside corner like that or against a door frame like this but we need something to attach to the wall with first and we're going to be using 18 gauge brad nails for that now this is a new battery powered one you can use a pneumatic if you want doesn't matter whatever you got but the nails however are two inches long you want your nails to be twice as thick as whatever you're going through in this case we're going through half inch drywall as well as half inch baseboard that's one inch so we need a two inch nail to make sure that we've got enough nail in the meat of that stud back there in the wall to make sure that it holds the baseboard on in the long run i'll show you how to do an inside corner here in a sec but if we're going to slide up against the door frame it's really really simple doesn't matter if it's a profile baseboard encasing or one of the other doesn't really matter it's a butt joint slide it up to it it's really simple this is an easy place to start however you have to make sure that when you nail on your baseboard here you go in at a bit of an angle with your nailer here about three quarters of an inch half inch away from the end your stud inside the wall here for your rough opening is going to be uh depending on the size of your casing is going to be inside of your casing here mine is probably flush about uh with the edge of my casing here so i know that if i shoot my nail in at a bit of an angle here i'm going to catch the 2x4 on the wall just back here and you're going to go and put a nail on the top of the nail on the bottom but what do you do if your baseboard is thicker than your door casing so let's say i've got half inch baseboard and half inch door casing here let's say i use three quarter inch baseboard instead of my baseboard just coming and dead ending like that and sticking out this quarter of an inch here an easy way to fix that is what you're going to do is take your baseboard slide it up to your door casing and you're going to mark where your casing lines up with your baseboard and we're going to cut this off at a 45 degree angle at the miter saw then what that's going to do is soften that transition and kind of look like it's diving behind your door casing like that and it just makes that a much softer transition and easier on the eye you can also do this if you've got cold air returns in line with your baseboard that are going to be a little bit thinner than the thickness of the baseboard the same method works all right now what do you do if you're starting an inside corner like this well that's one of the reasons i like flat stock baseboard a lot more than the profiled stuff other than just i prefer the design flat stock allows you to do something awesome called just a butt joint you literally take one piece slide it into the corner like that take another piece slide it into the corner like that once you caulk your seam and then caulk your top sides add your little touch-up paint at the end you'll never know what was there and this is a perfectly valid install option for flat stock baseboard but obviously if you have a profile baseboard you can't do this so what do you do well that's where we have to go with a mitered cut now a miter cut is obviously a cut on both sides typically 45 degrees and then you would attach them in the corner now the problem though with re cutting them at a 45 degree is your corners are never straight you probably heard that before corners are never straight the reason being is because there's drywall mud on each side of the corner here when they embedded the tape to seal the drywall itself and that mud actually throws off the angle of the corner a little bit so you got to account for that instead of cutting a 45 degree on this wall and a 45 degree on that wall a better option is to cut 244 degrees so i've got a 44 degree cut on that this side and a 44 degree cut on this side then i took and i pre-glued my joint instead of cutting the pieces and then just sliding them into there and then nailing them on the wall the problem with that is your joints can move around as the house shifts and everything the joint can open up you'll see a gap over time and it's very hard to get them to your profile to line up afterwards so pre-glue your joint once you cut your pieces glue them up doesn't matter if you use a wood glue or a super glue i use the super glue on this there's a ca glue from starbond i used a thick ca glue i spread it on one side i spray the other side with activator push them together and after about five seconds it's perfectly solidified now because these are both 44 degrees once you slide this and press it into the corner you can see it gives you a nice tight fit but it keeps your miter nice and tight and closed this is not going to open up over time and it just gives you a much nicer finish so if you have a profile baseboard cut them both to 44 degrees pre-glue your joint by the time you nail this to the wall and then caulk your top and bottom it'll be perfect it comes to installing our flat stock butt jointed corners i'm gonna slide it into the corner pretty firm and then i'm gonna push down slightly i'm not ramming it through the floor it's just closing any gap that might be under the carpet or any hard floor and on the carpet it's putting a little bit of tension on the tack strips you'll notice i'm also putting my nails close to the edge so the second piece of baseboard once it's slid up into place it's actually covering the first two nail holes so then the only nail holes i have to fill afterwards are the last two nails that i fire in here right in the corner i've also got my nail gun pointed slightly into the corner as well just to make sure i hit the medius part of the wood in the wall all right for an outside corner like this right here we have the same problem because there's going to be drywall mud embedding the corner bead right here the corner is never going to be perfectly square so unlike the inside corner where we cut 40 44 degree angles with an outside corner we want to cut 46 on both sides then i'll just tighten up the angle a little bit more on our baseboard because this is going to be a little bit larger also with a flat stock baseboard because you can do a butt joint on the inside you can do it on an outside corner but i wouldn't recommend it no matter the baseboard profiled or flat stock i would always do a miter joint on an outside corner like this but a flat stock baseboard can do a butt joint on the inside not a profile baseboard and as you can see right here both 46 degree angles once this is installed and nailed into place it is a nice tight fit all the way around now when you're firing your nails to an inside corner like this just remember there is a 2x4 stud everywhere there's a corner so as long as you keep your nails back about three quarters of an inch from your corner on each side just make sure that these ones you go above or this one below that so your nails don't collide inside the wall but you're gonna go ahead and just fire your nails top and bottom in there i also have another piece of wood right there so i'm gonna nail top and bottom in that corner that will hold this on nice and tight then same thing top and bottom on this corner right here that's going to hold this piece in place completely this joint should pretty much never open up it's pre-glued it's heavily nailed in place right into the wood be good for a long time with our corners finished up now we can start in the long straight walls now if you have a wall that is longer than the piece of baseboard you have we have to do a scarf joint so go ahead and just back cut a 45 degree angle on the end of that board and we'll come back to that in a second the corners are pretty easy because there should be wood pretty much everywhere but in the center of a wall we've obviously got to find our studs now the stud finder is obviously what we're going to need for that but i like these ones here that actually tell you where the center of the stud is as well as each corner an easy place to start is going to be around a plug-in if you have one now obviously that electrical box has to be mounted to something you just got to figure out if the stud is on the left or the right side of the box once you've found that out now we got to figure out the spacing of our studs in the wall they should be either 16 or 24 inches on center so i'm going to take my tape measure stretch it out and line my 24 inch up mark up first with about where the 2x4 is holding that electrical box up and then i'm going to check the edge of my tape measure to see if there's a stud there if there is perfect if there's not reset to 16 inches off of the electrical box and check again once you've figured out your spacing now we can nail on our baseboard next to our electrical box and this will hold that then you can slide your tape measure up and down the wall and keep on referencing that and it'll give you pretty much an idea of where all your studs are and you can just bang that board off in no time we can come back to our scarf joint you'll notice the rest of the baseboard is nailed on tight but i left this corner a little bit loose here so i still have some play in it now do not try and make this measurement here with a tape measure reference the board itself i'm going to mark where the back side of my cut is and the front side of my cut as well as the direction of my saw blade and when i cut this i'm actually going to cut it larger than my marks just in case my mark is a little bit off you can always take a little bit more off the board itself but adding it on is another story so you'll see here i cut it long that's perfect that was exactly what i wanted now i can literally just take off like small dusting off the edge of the board and it fit perfect once it does i'm gonna do the exact same miter joint cut that i did before with the starbond and the accelerator and that will give me a nice tight fitting scarf joint now the reason we don't do a butt joint in the middle of a wall like this we do the scarf joint it's far less noticeable because it's at that angled cut and it's going to be far more stable unlike just a butt joint in the center of a wall which could potentially open up over time and cause a gap and for a last little bit of added insurance at a slight angle right through my scarf joint itself i like to add a couple of nails there's no stud back there this is just nailing both of my boards together all right we're gonna get to finishing here in a second but i want to take a quick moment to address something before i get all the questions in the world about it and that is do you caulk your baseboard to your floor and the quick answer is caulking no but there are certain instances where you can use a transparent kitchen and bath silicone those instances are in your bathroom and your laundry room is pretty much the only two places you're ever going to use it the main areas of your house you're never going to do it same with if you have a wood floor laminate hardwood engineered hardwood you do not do it with your laundry room and your bathroom however typically they're going to have an already plasticky type vinyl floor either linoleum lvp lvts something like that where those are already a waterproof floor and you use the silicone underneath your baseboard to the floor and to prevent water from going underneath getting underneath the floor behind your baseboard up into the wall things like that because those rooms can have some water that can splash over that helps prevent that that is the only time so please don't ask all right with everything installed now we can start our finishing steps go ahead and get yourself a nice trim specific caulking it's more flexible it's less prone to cracking just get it it's not much more expensive cut the tip off at a slight angle and cut it as small as you possibly can i cut it smaller than an eighth of an inch which is perfect now we're going to start applying our caulking in the corners and what i was referencing earlier about the amount of mud in the corners you can actually see how much is in there based on the divot like the gap i've got a fill right here in the center of just this short little board it the mud is pushing the board away from the walls and the corners now when you're applying this apply nice thin consistent beads and wipe the tip off the caulking gun every now and again you'll notice every now and again too i also backtrack a little bit and when i do that i let off the trigger that's just to feel a little bit bigger of a gap that i had show up but you want a nice thin consistent bead across the entire thing after you've wiped it if you've noticed any gaps you can come back and fill those again later with just a little dollop on there and a quick swipe of your finger and it'll be gone i'm also going to fill in my corner joint here as well and that way once i've got this painted up it's going to be a nice smooth transition when it comes to wiping you can wipe this with a wet finger dry finger doesn't matter but i like to do it with my pinky dry and when i'm doing this i'm pushing the tip of my pinky towards the wall and i'm just sort of floating along the top of the baseboard this way it forces the caulking underneath my finger down into the gap to fill the gap as opposed to up on the wall every now and again you might have a bit ball up on you like that so i stopped wiped off my pinky and i switched to my index finger your index finger is a different curvature than your pinky and this allows you to just clean up the wall real quick without touching the caulking that you've already smoothed out so you don't make any smears then i just continue on with my pinky again forcing it down into the gap by pushing my pinky towards the wall now they're caulking finished we can work on our nail heads now i've got a putty knife here and i'm just scraping around the area of the nail heads ever so slightly because when you fire a nail into mdf it tends to kind of just swell the mdf around the nail head ever so slightly and this just makes sure everything is nice and flat by scraping it smooth then i'm going to take a little bit of a drywall spackle on the end of my putty knife that way the mud in the tub doesn't start to dry out on me and i'm just going to press it in with my fingers and then i'm just leaving just a slight amount on the surface as well that way when this stuff dries it's going to shrink a little bit and it doesn't create a divot i can come back with a 180 grit sanding sponge and just sand it smooth takes a quick little pass and then everything is nice and flat for us now we can finish it out so using that same four inch roller and the same paint that we painted the boards with i'm gonna come back with just a small amount of paint on the roller and i'm gonna feather out the area that i've touched up i'm gonna go wider than that area it feathers out the paint once it dries it's the same paint it's just going to blend right in but i'm also going to make sure that i cover up all of my sanding marks and just a little bit farther and everything will just blend in beautifully then i'm going to take a two and a half inch tapered trim brush and i'm just going to do a little bit of touch-ups on the top of my scarf joint as well as right along the edge of the floor there where i couldn't get down there with a roller without risking touching the carpet and then you can also do the entire top side of your baseboard if you want if you have a nice steady hand just to help paint any caulking that might be there to help prevent discoloration over time well everybody and that is it i generally hope you learned something on this job if you did and you guys are going to tackle this let me know down in the comments down below give me a thumbs up and if you guys do this send me some pictures i would love to see it if you guys have any questions maybe something i didn't cover let me know i will do my best to answer everybody but other than that i'll see you guys in the next one thanks for watching you want to know now it's pretty warm in here reshoot

Channel: Jesse does DIY

Views: 558,425

Keywords: diy, how to, beginner, instruction, rustic, tutorial, baseboard, trim, install, base, board, base board, how to install baseboard

Id: vRZJJdAXMFY

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021