Fitting the new hallway skirting board

I have had this post saved in my drafts for ages, so not sure why I have never published it.  As you may have guessed, I did this work a couple of weeks/months ago so not the current state of the hallway, which is practically finished! Yay!

So the hallway skirting board...

I started with none as I had ripped out all of the old skirting board when we demo-ed the room (all ghastly, none of it matched with each other - really weird).  It's not the house for lovely period skirting, so I went for a nice rounded top edge skirting.

I had a few obstacles though - one of which was the front door plinth.

A quick mark up in pencil and I was on the hand saw.  (I thought it might have been a bit overkill to get the circular saw out for this one :-D )

Perfect.  (Except the gap above the skirting board to the door architrave obviously... to be fixed with caulk at a later date)

The walls were by no means straight.  I mean, who actually has straight walls anyway?  Once I added adhesive to the backs of the boards though, it pulled it in a bit, and the gap behind the board reduced which was good - not so much filling to do later!

This was the bit at the base of the stairs.  This was my first go of caulking the gap to try and make it match up.  There were several more rounds of sanding, caulking, sanding, caulking etc. to get it to a finished product.

This is my patented "skirting board holder whilst the glue is drying" device. A brick!  Haha! Although the special bit is the piece of kitchen towel around it, as I had just gotten it out the garden and I didn't want the brick to mark the skirting board.

I also added a small strip of moulding next to the front door.  There was a big old gap here and the good work of our insulating under the floorboards was being completely undone as a gale force draught was coming up this gap.  I went on to stain this moulding to match the floor so it blends right in - I though painting it white might make it look a bit weird.

I only had one straight join in all my work, which was fab news (although i did have loads of corners). There is nothing that a bit of caulk can't solve.  This was the first round before sanding, caulking etc...

I ummed and ahhed about using grip adhesive or nailing the skirting board in.  I think I would have made a right old mess with nails, and there were very few places that I would have actually been able to nail to.  With my brick 'device' though, the glue worked out just fine.  I used Gripfill and just squiggled it on the back of the board - more when the gap it needed to join was wider.

I appreciate there aren't many progress photos of this - I actually did it whilst an Anthony Nolan nurse was in the house giving my husband injections (he donated stem cells in December - so proud of him), but needles make me hit the deck, so I was furiously busying myself trying not to see/hear/think about needles and injections!  I am such a pansy when it comes to anything gory, and by gory, I mean a drop of blood and I'm out, haha!

I used my awesome circular saw to cut the lengths right as my saw has a 45 degree function on it which was great.  I'm usually quite good with visualizing stuff, like those diagrammatic reasoning tests they make you do at job interviews?  Anyway, on this day I was a complete space cadet and I just could not cut it the right way - I had to do so many cuts twice.  Maybe it was the needles on the brain... Or maybe I'm just a full time space cadet!

Once the adhesive was dry (I left it for 24 hours), I used Frog Tape along the top of the skirting and used some decorators caulk to fill in any gaps.

Total Costs of Project

Tools

Circular saw - already owned

Hand saw - already owned

Sealant gun - already owned

Materials

Wickes Skirting Board Primed MDF (14.5x69x2400mm), Pack of 5  £23.45

Wickes Pine Quadrant Moulding £4.05

Gripfill Adhesive   £2.49

Decorators Caulk   £1.95

Frogtape   £5.99

Total Cost = £37.93

The final reveal of the hallway is within touching distance!

Preparing and Priming the stairs

Progress has been a bit slow on the hallway as of late, so I really needed to do something to give myself a boost.  Little effort for maximum benefit.

The stairs really needed painting as the old yellow and mustard coloured paint look was really starting to get tired!  But first a little prep...

There were some big old gaps between the steps and the steps had taken a battering with the amount of staples and nails that had been put in them over the years.

So, I started by filling them in.  Some of them were really quite large so I started with Gripfill, hoping that might do the trick.  Some also needed some stripwood to fill the gap as it was that large.

Unfortunately, even in areas with a small amount of filler, it shrunk quite a lot on drying and it all cracked up.

Round 2 of filling.

I went back to my trusty deep gap filler from Toolstation.

There was one particular hole which wouldn't retain any filler.  So I got a little crafty.  I cut out a small section of foil from a foil tray (narrow enough to just be able to fit through the hole) and pierced a small hole in the middle.  I then got a pierce of string and knotted it underneath.

[It just happens there was a big hole in one of the stairs, and one hole in the floorboards on the landing - the following photos are of the landing, but I used the same technique for the stairs]

I then put some gripfill on the upper side of the foil (the side with the longest length of string), and carefully poked it through the hole.

Once I had poked it through, I used the string to gently pull the foil up  and make contact with the underside of the floorboard.  I used a piece of tape to secure the string just whilst it dried, and then added a little more gripfill to try and fill the gap a little bit to start with.

Once dried, the string can be cut.  The hole on the landing I topped up with wood filler as this would be stained to match the floor, but the hole on the stairs, I filled with deep gap filler as this would be painted.

I intended to use Johnstones Acrylic Eggshell Paint in Brilliant White as it claims to stay white and not yellow over time.  I will see how it lives up to those claims in time.  But to use this product it advises you use Johnstones Joncryl Acrylic Primer.  A bit of a sand of all my filler first and I was good to go.

What a difference a bit of paint makes!  I also LOVE the contrast between the white and the wall colour. Yum!

I also discovered the joys of masking tape, specifically yellow Frogtape (for sensitive surfaces).  It has paint block technology to give a really clean edge.  I'd never really had much success with masking tape and it always bled paint underneath.  Confession - I always figured it was for people without any skills to paint a straight line.  That is until now! I LOVE it!

It saves so much time.  Rather than faffing about - just tape on, paint (not even taking any particular care), tape off. Done. I'm sold.

That's only the primer on the steps, I still need to prep  and paint all the spindles and banister on the stairs (a job I'm putting off as I know it will take ages!), as well as properly paint the steps with the top coat, but progress is progress nonetheless, and I'm chuffed.