How to Install Skirting Boards - a DIY Guide

in today's video I'm going to show you how I instilled the skirting boards in this bedroom last week now this is a funny old area of DIY in the sense that there's no right way to do this and how you install yours will depend very much on the type of skirting boards you've got and the type of walls you're facing so today's video is my take on installing skirting boards based on a number of years experience installing skirting boards around this old cottage and I'll do my best as I go along to show you all the different techniques that there are which might apply better to your situation [Applause] today's video is divided up into five areas set up and tools whether you should use wood or MDF the method of fixing the skirting board how to deal with corners and a bit of a discussion on scribing skirting boards around things like uneven floors so let's have a quick look at the setup I've got my battered old black & decker workbench which I tend to use for all my cutting I then combine that with sawhorses to support the material that I'm cutting recommend these things highly enough and you may see my video a year or two back where I combine these sawhorses to make a fantastic DIY workbench you can get the version featured in today's video for $49.99 from screw fix or a lighter weight version for 19 pounds ninety-nine and that's for a pair we're going to be cutting some 45-degree angles today so I'll be showing you this miter box I've made a couple of years ago but if you can get hold of a miter saw it'll make your life so much easier and actually the price of some of them might surprise you and the other option which I almost forgot about today a circular saw moving on to tools I recommend this oh and Jack floorboard saw as you get a really precise cut with its finer teeth and it's also good for my tea boxes my other general saw is this owen jack universal which would also serve you pretty well I'll be using a coping saw to cut the corners the skirting board but we'll be discussing the pros and cons of this technique house against using a sliding miter saw or a miter box which also comes in handy for joining skirting boards midway along the wall it's a good idea to seal any gaps between the wall and the floor particularly if you've just installed insulated plaster board so I'll quickly show you today how I use a combination for expanding foam tape and spray foam to eradicate any thermal bridges prior to installation today I'll be mechanically fixing my skirting boards to the winch the reasons I'll explain shortly and I'm using a new technique which minimizes the need for drilling and filling these lost tight screws and a turn 1/2 millimeter Bower to HSS drill bit to pilot the skirting boards and in the same movement mark exactly the position on the wall where we need to drill for the wall plugs and these six millimeter diameter wall plugs worked really well with the lost I'd screws this bag of glazing packers often comes in handy and today I'm using the one millimeter version to create the slight space between the skirting board and the floor so that I can protect the floor when painting the skirting boards if we were going to glue this coating board you want to grab a deceive like one of these and I do in fact use my glue gun for one section of the wall I thought there's a vintage block plane on the advice of my carpenter mate I'll be using it today in conjunction with the scribing I wouldn't be without this fantastic little tool you'll need some sandpaper and I find this okie to be very durable and to clog a lot less than some brands and finally the two-part wood filler to fill the pin holes left by the screws I've lost count of how many turns of this I've got through over the years I've only been in two main colors white and pine to match the materials you're filling there if you're painting the color obviously isn't a problem and speaking of painting I primed the underside of the skirting boards before fitting them to the wall with my favorite primer Zinser bi n should we be using natural wood or MDF for a skirtings well this is a tricky one as I said at the start highly motivated by personal preference but there are a few influencing factors to consider my local timber merchants I always try and buy from the independence where I can stock eighteen millimeter by a hundred and nineteen millimeter primed Taurus MDF for two pounds eighty-one a meter or the deeper version 144 millimeters for three pounds thirty-six whereas the pine that I had decided to go for these must be the pre plain dimensions because my pine is actually 20 millimeters by 166 was 30 pounds of meter cheaper than the narrow MDF so I went for this and combined it with a 68 by 20 millimeter og architrave which is a fairly classic combination but was I right to plumb for natural wood over MDF for these skirting boards well I always find pre-primed MDF like my window boards here to be a little bit rough where it's been told and require a little bit of sanding and with MDF I always worry about using it in rooms that have a susceptibility to damp and I also worry about dents and scratches from vacuums and the like pine also has its vulnerabilities owing in part to this annoying habit they have making it double-sided eyelash light carpet fitters breaking the skirting board before with this vulnerable Oh G on the underside but my main issue with this skirting board is the ridiculous amounts of warping that's happened since I got it back obviously as you can see here it's nice and true in the cold dry environment in the warehouse but as soon as I got it back into a heated house even though this room isn't heated it walked ridiculously based along its length down its width and also vertically now this warping has heavily influenced the way I've installed my skirtings and created some real problems such as larger gaps than I would have liked between the skirting and the wall a few massive headaches with cutting and joining skirtings at 45 degree angles midway down the walls which won't be square if like here your piece of skirting isn't flat on the saw bed when you make the cut and also butting up boards at the internal and external corners so on my next project I'll almost certainly be using MDF okay once step three should we be screwing or nailing the skirtings gluing them or perhaps a combination of the two the Royals of this depends on what tools you got available and what wools you're attaching the skirting boards to generally in the past because of the uneven nature of my old Victorian brick walls tended to spray carpenter make my particular new builds uses a pin gun with 40 or 50 millimeter nails combined with glue and there's a pretty good reason for that because if you look at the tubes of grab a decent of themselves they'll tell you that where you're fixing vertical applications like skirting boards you need to temporarily hold the skirting boards in place while the glue sets and whilst we're typical gravity sitive like this this could take anything up to 24 hours it makes sense to use an element of mechanical fixing whether that's nails or screws to hold those coating boards in place whilst they're setting the exception is glue guns like this which have a 48 second glue that goes off in a total time of five minutes so obviously in that situation you're holding this curtain got in place for a much shorter period of time and I did experiment with this glue on a short section of skirting board or be it backed up with the lost tight screws the because I don't have the luxury of relying on glue alone but I've got to say the tack fix is decent was holding pretty well before I put the screws in but what do I think you should do if your walls are completely flat and true and you can find a way to hold the skirtings in place while the glue is going off I would be tempted to try and glue your skirting board without any screws or nails but for me the screws are an extra insurance policy a because my skirting boards are so warped and beat because in this old cottage the walls are not true so I decided to screw my skirting boards to the wall and I thought I'm gonna do that there's no point gluing because once they're screwed in place they're not going to move particularly what we caught along the top was this the right decision possibly not whilst the skirting board is holding in some areas in others you can see a little bit of an evidence of movement which of course isn't helped again by these unstable natural wood skirtings you're not going to have this problem with MDF I've obviously got large gaps and cork has a propensity to shrink anyway but with a benefit of hindsight what I probably should have done is glued at the very least the top section where you've got the decorative tourist element to prevent the skirting board from moving installing skirting boards is a painstaking process screwing them to the wall is even worse and when you have to fill the countersunk holes as I've done in the past after using 8 by 2 inch or 2 and a half inch typical wood screws like this it's sort of kicking you when you're down say today to minimize on the filling I decided to use these lost type screws with their ridiculously tiny screw heads which are akin to a lost head nail or an oval now and also this Threadless section with the secondary thread near the head itself does really help to pull the skirting board back towards all because the sceptics amongst you will say are but you're not gonna get nearly as much pulling force or the skirting board back to the wall and you're of course right but I think looking at these clips you should be pretty impressed with the power of these funny little screws and let's face it if you've got skirting boards that are as warped as I have then you're really unlucky typical MDF skirting boards with reasonably even walls and minimal points of springing you're not gonna be so worried about pulling the skirting board back to the wall so I urge you to give these little screws a go because they make the filling at the end of the job so much quicker and as you saw earlier in the toolkit section I used to turn a half millimeter HSS drill bit to mark the position on the wall that I then needed to drill with my larger six millimeter masonry drill bit my red wall plugs and the whole process was about straightforward as it could have been the only exception being for the exterior wall of the house where I used these fish Europe our six five thirties and a female drill bit so I didn't puncture through the vapor barrier on the back of the insulated plastic and on this external wall I sealed the gap between the insulated plaster board on the floor with this expanding foam tape a link to a recent video on which is coming up on screen now this stuff is great because unlike spray foam is breathable whilst keeping water penetration out to 600 Pascal's of pressure while still eliminating thermal bridges and is obviously flexible I ran out of the foam for the internal wolf which still needs some installation because of draught from the roof space so I used the more typical spray foam I'm now going to show you two ways to approach your internal corners firstly this traditional approach which is the way I do all of mine you start by marking the area you've got to cut on the back of the skirting because it's much easier and more accurate to trace the line of the skirting board on the back and on the decorative torus or AG front straight skirting boards this is a joy with wonky ones like this it's a little bit tricky because you're going to work out the angle of the wonky skirting board on the corresponding wall to the wall that your scribing you then make three cuts with your standard saw and then reach for your coping saw for the semicircular bit this is a terrible coping so I bought it years ago and it's really flimsy but it kind of does a job as long as you take your time and you don't rush the clever thing about these saws in case you didn't know is that by unscrewing the handle you can change the direction of the blade so that the main body of the saw is bear here doesn't get in their way when you're soaring things like semicircles take your time with this because if you rush the blade will Bend and the cut will not be accurate wooden spoon with a bit of 80 grit sandpaper a little bit of fine tuning and there we have it one scribe corner piece other tools that sometimes used to help with the scrubbing process on my power file a my old Bosch belt sander for fine-tuning the cut so the warp skirting boards can be butted up to each other seamlessly now the second and by far the easiest option if you've got one is to use a sliding miter saw and mine has a single bevel which means you can tilt it to a 45-degree angle in just one direction in order to make your 45 degree miter cuts more expensive miter saws have a double bevel which means you can pivot them both ways [Music] now if you haven't got a miter saw you can make your own miter box like I've done here I have tried to buy my two boxes in the past like this Draper version here but I've found them being plastic to be quite flimsy and you've only got a few make a few errant cuts into the factory cuts on the box itself and then suddenly the miter cuts that you're trying to make and no longer accurate what do I say about this miter box well it is hard work I've done a demonstration for today's video started with my Owen floor portal which isn't really sharp enough so I reverted from mine oh and Jack Universal saw where it's a much easier but overall they do a pretty good job and you can see how I've used it to good effect to make an external corner or bear with smaller skirting boards because I made this miter box for a previous project and the skirting boards I'm using today don't fit the box and I nearly forgot to mention today my brilliant little circular saw which can also do cross cuts 45-degree cuts and so much more I've done a video on that and a link is coming up on the screen now but with all these techniques available are still sticking to traditional scribing on my internal corners why because you can do it with really simple tools it's easier than using a miter box and a lot of us don't have miter saws the second reason is with internal corners that aren't quite ninety degrees it doesn't matter with this traditional technique it still works whereas with a miter saw reach the corners are 90 degrees you don't set the angle properly you're gonna be left with a gap a third reason learning this traditional technique gives you the skill set to take on other intricate tasks like here where I had to scribe my skirting into the architrave but don't forget where your joining skirting boards mid run across the room it's a good idea to use a 45 degree cut that way you can achieve invisible join between the skirting boards and for this you'll need to cut your 45-degree angle free with a miter saw miter box or your circular saw as I just demonstrated typical example here where I had says slightly improvised again because of the warped skirting boards this time with the lost tied screws coming to the rescue okay what's the fun section of video Graham will talk about scribing and one other improvisational technique I've had to use I had two issues with this floor firstly a convex bulge in the floor on one side of the room and in this situation if you have got a bit of a bulge in the floor you need to remove the bolts from the skirting board itself this was essential if I was going to get my skirting board to sit flush with the floor at its far end I did this by marking at the pencil all the boulders were and then carefully removing and gradually with my old vintage block plane it's a lovely little tall this advised you to get one yourself a link to my previous videos coming up your screen now buts be careful and keep your hands above the bed of the plane a freaking tree on this jobs around about now left me with a 20 millimeter splinter in my thumb for over a week whilst I was filming today's video lesson to us all to be careful even when using an oculus tools like this I was in a lot of pain while that splinter worked its way out I'm glad it did as NHS in the current lockdown situation would not thank me for going into hospital with that with any scribing process you need to be a little bit patient and you offer the skirting up several times to get all the contours accurately scribed as you gradually get the skirting down to the position it needs to be in but it's well worth doing because eventually I was able to remove all of the bulges and to get the skirting sitting flush with the floor the second issue I had was with a concave sagging of the floor on the other side of the room which left me more than a fingers width gap between the skirting and the floor and if you're wondering why my floor is so chaotic you've only got to take a look at the floor joists before I laid the new floor in this situation you obviously can't take anything off the skirting boards themselves because if you did there'd be a mismatch between the skirting board and the next ghosting board connecting to it at each end and no amount of force in the middle could lower the skirting board down with a solution of placing a single mitre saw cut in the skirting and each point where it needs to be lowered it took just enough of the guts out of the skirting to give me the flexibility to be pushed down eliminating the gap it was then just simply case of gluing the cuts with a PVA wood fella screwing them into position with the tongue tight screws and the fissure duro power plugs and then filling the cuts with my two-part wood filler and whilst we're talking about filler as I said earlier the beauty of these lost tight screws is filling is minimal and something each pair of screws takes under ten seconds so that's it for today I hope that will make sense and that you found it useful if you did that it'd be great if you could click on the like button below don't forget details all the tools and the processors I've been through today will be in the description below the video which I'll see you can access by clicking on the little arrow on your smartphone or the show more button on your PC in the description section you'll find a link to my paypal donate page you'll be amazing if you could give me just a pound or two as it helps me to keep creating this free content stay tuned in my next video I think I'm going to talk about caulking these skirting boards particularly given the issues I had with that large gaps I think it might make for quite interesting video and if you're new to my channel as I always say I would ask love to have you subscribe you can do that by clicking on the link here see you soon

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 515,429

Rating: 4.9111218 out of 5

Keywords: skirting boards, how to, skirting board installation, cutting skirting, mdf skirting board, wood skirting boards, baseboard tips, fix skirting to brick walls, cutting skirting board corners, cutting skirting with mitre saw, mitre block, coping saw, cutting skirting corners by hand, how to fit skirting boards, brick walls, plasterboard walls, lost tite screws, how to install skirting boards, uneven walls, warped skirting board

Id: qhe3Waq6Ac4

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020