Back to work in Wildwood

As the state starts to reopen from the Coronavirus pandemic, I decide to make a trip back to Wildwood to work on the cottage to finish up some of the major outstanding items on the renovations. When I stopped work the bedroom was mostly done except for a hatch needed for HVAC access in the new ceiling, hanging trim, shellacking all of the trim, and refinishing the floors.

The bathroom was also undergoing a renovation, but I am using a contractor for that work so not too much of that was dependend on me, although I am trying to do some of the painting and staining.

Since I’m easing back into the process of going back to Wildwood, I only go down for a half a day to knock out a few things. I start with finishing the hatch I was building to cover up the access hole to the HVAC in the bedroom. I had most of the hatch built, but it needed some trimming to get it to fit into the opening. Also I need to attach the hardware.

The hatch is about 1/4-1/2 inch too large so I do a combination of a jigsaw, plane, and a Japanese rasp to shave off enough wood to get the hatch panel to fit nicely. As a woodworking novice, I get too fixated on making my major cuts correct, but forget to realize that after the main cut, there’s lots of techniques to start fudging things to get pieces to fit tightly. After I get the size correct, I attach the hardware and hang the hatch.

Hatch with hardware.

Next up after the hatch is attaching the trim. This one makes me a little nervous because I think trim is one of the trickier tasks and the rooms I have are not square or plumb. While away from Wildwood, I pre-stained and shellacked all of the trim since the last year, I stained the trim in place and it went OK, but I had to be very careful not to get drips on the walls. Last year I hired a carpenter to hang the trim in the other bedroom because I got scared off reading about how to hang crown molding in a room with ceiling and walls that are not at 90%. The carpenter came up with a nice solution to just use 1x3s which made things simpler and also fit the vibe of the cottage. I figure I’ll try to use what he did in the previous room to match the current renovation.

I start hanging the trim and run into a few issues. Over the window, the clearance between the window casing and the ceiling is far less than in the other bedroom. The trim selected for the room is a 1x3, but for the window, I had to go with a 1x2 to fit the area. I try to test fit the 1x2 over the window, and even with that, one of the rosettes is a little higher causing an impossible tight fit. it looks like I’ll need to trim a little of height off of the rosette, but I don’t have a good tool to fit into the space to do any work. I’ll see if I can do that with a file, but since I don’t have one, I’m going to skip that part till next week.

I move the rest of the room and start piecing in the trim around HVAC duct. That goes OK, but for one part I miss the measurements by about a 1/8 of an inch so I’ll need to cut a little piece to fill in that gap.

Trim around the chimney.

Once I get trim around the chimney, I try the long stretch of ceiling that meets the slanted eave. Here things get a little tricky trying to get 1 piece of wood to lay nicely on the plastered wall. The plaster is not perfectly flat so there’s bulges that push the trim out in different areas. I have 2 square blocks on either end of the trim and it seems impossible to line up the trim on both blocks, so I decide to split the wood into 2 pieces where I can possibly get more movement to deal with the bulges in the plaster instead of 1 long piece of wood.

The molding applied in 2 pieces.

This technique works OK but the 2 pieces don’t join up perfectly in sync. It’s getting late so I give up and figure that I’ll take up this and also the window challenge next weekend.

Before I go, I check into the bathroom to get a sense of where that is. All of the shower and tile work is done along with the ceiling and walls. We were able to re-use a lot of the baseboard but did have to apply a new baseboard cap and also new trim for the window and door. For these pieces I’m going to try and stain them to match the original baseboards.

Bathroom progress.

Original molding with the new cap.