Webs’ Random Ideas

Well I have been home for a day and already my parents are cracking the whip .  Well… actually I knew I was going to help them with the basement baseboards. Above is the picture of my Dad’s ex-boss, Vic,  who was helping me.  He is retired now and is one of the best wood workers I have ever worked with or seen.  And considering he is 90 years young (and moves like someone in their 60′s), all of the work he does is spectacular.  But I especially liked our work bench we had in my parents basement (some might call it a ping pong table…). Anyways, baseboard work is usually not hard, most of it consists of cutting boards at a 45 degree angle and measuring lengths of the boards.  But our house has special (by special I mean there are some strange and just down-right stupid) features.  So we actually had to measures some strange angles which means that I actually got a chance to use that geometry I learned in high school.  So how’d it go you ask?  Well we started by measuring the weird angles.  After we measured some distances Vic looked at me and I looked back at him and he said, "So… do you remember anything about geometry?"  I went on the Internet to look up how to find angles of right triangles (yes I know it is simple math, but I haven’t used it for a while ), and when I thought I had an answer Vic said he knew what to do.  There were only a couple other oddities we ran into.  Below is a picture of one of them.

It might be hard to distinguish, but this is a picture of a corner where the wall meets the carpet.  This particular part of the wall had a lot of extra dry wall on it.  Don’t ask me why, but it had so much that if we applied the baseboard, it wouldn’t have sat flush on the wall, in fact it would have been about an 1/8th to 1/4 of an inch off the wall.  So I took a tool and shaved off what wasn’t needed.  If you look in the pictures you can see chunks of what was on the wall.  I know that the picture is small, but compared to the size of the picture, it’s a lot of extra crap that was applied in great amounts to many sections of the basement wall near the floor.

The other thing we ran into was that a lot of the wall was either concave or convex.  They were not flush, so it appears that the baseboard bows out somewhat.  Well regardless this is my first baseboard experience, and I think if I had to I could do it by myself.  I actually had a good time working on it and it was surprising how quickly time went by.  For more pictures view my image gallery at the top of the page.