When you're doing
up a room, it's the finishing touches that
can make all the difference, like the moldings. If you're doing up
an old room, you can reuse your
existing moldings. You'll save a bundle, and it'll
keep the original character of the room. Or if you're after
a new look, there are plenty of new
moldings to choose from. For this job, I'm going to
be installing new moldings, skirting along the
bottom, scotia at the top, and architraves around
the door and window. OK. These are our
pre-primed architraves, straight out of the factory. Now, we're going
to do our first. The reason we do this is because
once the architraves are on, all that skirting's
going to butt up to it. Now, what we're going
to do first, just make sure there is
nothing on the floor, there's no old bits
of paint or anything. So that sits nice and square,
hard down on the floor. It's looking lovely. I've already pre-cut
that square on the end. Now, what we're going to look
for is a three millimeter quirk. A quirk is the distance from
the edge of the architrave up to our doorjamb. Now, the reason we
give ourselves a quirk, if I was to put that
architrave flush with the edge of our doorjamb,
after a while, the timber's going to move. The paint's going to crack. The door's going to be slammed. After a while, you're going to
be left with quite an open gap, and that looks pretty ugly. So what we're doing,
by moving that over about three millimeters,
it doesn't look so bad if the door was to
move or the architraves is going to open
up a little bit. So in our case here, we're going
to go for a three millimeter quirk. So I'm going to come up from
the bottom of my doorjamb three millimeters, and I'm going
to put a little mark there on my architrave. That indicates the
short point of my miter. So it's just to help us out
when we get to our chop saw and cut it. We're just going to put a like
going down that way, just so I remember when I get over there,
my 45 degree goes on that angle there. So that's my left side. My top, I've already pre-cut
a 45 degree on one end, so this is going to help me out. Now that just sits
on there, remembering to keep our three millimeter
gap from the edge of our jamb to the side of where our
new architrave will sit. And we come over to
the other side here, and once again we allow
a three millimeter quirk. Mark that. That's our short
point on the miter. And helping ourselves
out, indicating which way our miter's going to go. So I've done our
top and our lift. Now, our right-hand side is
exactly the same as the left. Sitting that nice and
square on the ground. We allow three millimeters. That's the short
point on my miter. And that's the way our
angle is going to go. Right. We can take these out to our
chop saw, cut all these in one, bring them back in
ready for putting on. Now it's a good idea to cut all
the miters on your architraves at the same time. OK. I'm putting the architraves on
with our good old trusty pin gun there, but
there's nothing wrong with using your hammer
and some finishing nails. We're starting at the bottom
and working our way up. That way we're just following
the contour of the door jamb, ensuring that we've got
our three millimeter gap the whole way
up that's going to form our lovely
little three mil quirk. Righty-o. When you're putting
these nails in, you just want to make sure
they actually work in pairs. One's going in the door
jamb, and one's actually going into our stud. So a lot of these are
doors, there's only a couple of nails that are holding
them, so what we're doing is ensuring that the door jamb
is not going to move anymore. So don't be afraid to
give it plenty of nails. We can always fill
them in later. OK. Now top piece. OK, so what we do, good old
trusty little bit of PVA there. OK, I've put our PVA on. Let's just marry that joint up. Now we just repeat the same
for our last architrave. Little bit of PVA on there. And this time, we've got
to start from the top and work our way down. Just ensuring all the
time that we've got a nice even three
millimeter quirk. Now here's a little tip for you. When you come close
to our door handle, don't put your nail right
when your door handle is. Because you've got to
change that out later, and you're going to be
chiseling in to your door jamb, what you're going
to find, you're going to end up
striking your nail. So you can happily go straight
up above it and below it. Just don't put it
right in the middle. OK. Lastly, all we've got to do,
we'll clean off that PVA. And if you feel
unhappy with that join, you give that a really
light little sand. And then we'll just go along
and fill our nail holes, and ready for our top coat. OK, there's architraves done. Time to head to our skirtings. Right. There's two walls you take
into consideration when you're starting off you skirting. The first one is
the wall directly opposite your door, the wall
that you're going to see first. The next one is the
wall next to your door. So let's have a measure up. Two meters and 38. Righty-o. So I'm going to go and cut
this and fix that back in. OK, we've measured
our first wall. Made a mark on
our skirting here. Now that is going to be a
square cut on both ends. OK, just before we rock into
putting our skirting down, we just want to make sure that
our flow is nice and level. So we've got our trusty
little [? blade ?] scraper. And let's just take
away any old glue or bit of build-up of varnish. Sweet. Once again, trusty
little bit of PVA. Now with our PVA, you can
glue the back of the skirting if you like, but I'd
prefer only to glue where it's butting up against
our architrave or another piece of skirting. Let's just sit that in there. Now, a good little tip when
you're doing your skirting-- just to make sure that the
skirting gets hard down onto your floor, take an
old piece of three by one, set that gently on
top of the skirting, and just put a little
bit of pressure on that. That comes down nice and
tight up against the floor. Another little tip for you also. When you're fixing pins into
your skirting into the wall, you want to make
sure that you use the pins that are just enough
to go into the framing itself. If you go in too
long, you might not know where any of your
pipes or wires are. You certainly don't want to
hurt anything you shouldn't. So you don't want it
to go into the frame any more than about
10, 15 millimeters, about the thickness of this
board that we've got here now. Now it's time to measure up the
skirting between the two walls I've already done. I'll need to make an
overscribe on the ends, which creates the illusion
of having a miter and helps hide any gaps
that may appear later. I'll show you how to do it. OK. So I've just cut a miter
on one end of our skirting. This is for our overscribe. Now all you do it's
cut that on 45 degrees. And we use our nice little
trusty coping saw here. And just slightly
undercutting, we work our way up that short point. Sometimes it's a little bit
easier if you grab your pencil and just use that to
highlight that edge, so you can see it
nice and crispy. Yeah, just really carefully
take yourself up to that mark, and then come back
to our top point. Now that should fit quite
nicely into our other piece of skirting. Once your first
end is overscribed, then measure the
length of the skirting. OK. You've seen how to cut
the nice plain skirting. If you've got the
slightly fancier skirting, I'm going to show you how
to overscribe that as well. OK. So we're still cutting
our 45 degrees. And once again, I just
use the old pencil to highlight that edge. And you just want to
slightly undercut it. Not too radically,
but not square, but just slightly undercut. So the only point
that actually touches is that short point there. It's a really good
idea to practice overscribing on an off cut. Carefully follow the
profile of the skirting. [BLOWING] Now that skirting there just
overscribes that beautifully. That there, very
simply, is how you do an overscribe on your skirting. OK. So we've cut our nice
little overscribe there. Let's just very
gently lower that down and marry that up
with our existing one. And that just butts
in there quite nicely. Obviously we're going to
put some glue on there, and now we're ready to pin it. Now the good thing
about this overscribe is, it looks like
it's 45 degrees, so it keeps it nice and tidy. We've got our 45 degree
cut on the top there. And if the room was
to move whatsoever, it's going to hide any
sort of a movement. No gaps whatsoever. So if we were to put a 45 degree
on both of those skirtings, the room only has
to move slightly, and you're got to get a big,
gaping gap you're going to see from every part of the room. But if the room was to move
once we've done our overscribe, you'd have to actually come
right down the side here to look into it. So that's the reason
for our overscribe. So I've nailed my last
piece of skirting on. Now it's time to
start the scotia. Righty-o. When you're measuring up
for your scotia, same thing as your skirting. Measure the wall straight
opposite the door first, and then wall straight
above your door. Now, I've got a
little tip when you're measuring for your scotia. You don't have to worry
about going the whole way. Let's just come round about
half way, butt that in. If you're working on your own,
this is quite nice and handy. I've got 1.7 on the right. Let's just write that
down so I don't forget. And measuring for the
lift, we've got 1.6-- 1632. 1632. So add those up,
and that gives us the exact length of our scotia. Cut your first lengths
of scotia square. So here's my lovely
square cut scotia. Now, when you're
putting the scotia up, you know we've got
a top plate, and I know in the ceiling
I've got a knob that's running all the way around. So I don't have to try and
locate my rafters for the pins. Just have to note to try and
get that back nice and tight. With these old wobbly
ceilings, you've just got to do your best to
try and pull that in as much as you can. For our second piece
of scotia, we'll need to cut an overscribe
like we did for the skirting. I'll show you how to do this. OK. I've just measured my scotia. Now, a quick little
tip when you're cutting this profiled scotia. At the bottom, when you look up,
you're going to see 45 degrees. So you want to make sure you
have a 45 degree on the bottom. Our cut is going to go that way. We'll square on that end. And it just-- it's
always a really good tip to do that before you cut it,
because it's really easy to stuff up. So I've got my 45 degree the
bottom, square cut on there. I've titled my saw
over on 45 degrees. That way I know I'm going to
get a square cut there and 45 on the bottom. So lovely. That's the first part
of my overscribe. Once again, let's
just use our pencil. And with our trusty coping saw-- and I'm just going to come up
a little bit off the bottom so we don't damage our
little end tip there. And we just finish off
that delicate little-- Now that there will fit
absolutely beautiful in the corner of our room. Now, it's a great little
tip to cut your overscribe on the end of your scotia
or your skirting first, before you actually
measure it to length. That way, if you
make a little blue, you can always cut another
miter on the end of it and then redo your scotia. So cut your overscribe first,
and then measure off it. So that's my scotia up, with
the overscribe looking lovely. Now it's time to
fill any holes, give your moldings a light sand,
and then you can paint them. So I tidied up this room with
a whole new set of moldings. Scotia at the top, skirting
at the bottom, and architraves the doors and windows. It really was easy as.
