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Finish Carpentry - Page 45 of 46

Once the house has a roof and windows, once the drywall is up and the floors are laid, then the finish carpenters roll up their sleeves and go to work. Finish carpentry — the installation of trim, cabinets and shelving, stairs and other details — is what transforms a house from a work-in-progress into a completed home.

Finish work is often about details, and carpenters draw on long experience to execute them precisely. Whether it’s crown molding, baseboard, or a built-in bathroom cabinet, the results will be among the first things that anyone entering a room will notice. Flaws like mismatched grain or joints that don’t line up exactly the way they’re intended are the bane of any finish carpenter.

And so most finish carpenters have learned a trick or two about getting it right. Is there a simple way to outline an elliptical doorway? Yes. Can shelving be attached to the wall without any visible means of support to look as if it’s floating? Of course. Is there a way of building a custom cabinet that rolls under an adjacent counter when not in use? You bet. Fine Homebuilding’s authors have been there.

New construction is one thing. Restoration carpenters and remodelers, of course, face wholly different challenges. They’re working with an existing building where floors are rarely level and walls perfectly plumb. That calls on finish carpenters to know not only the basics, but also how to adapt these techniques to a house that’s far from perfect.

Whether the house is old or new, and regardless of the materials or architectural style in which the project has been designed, Fine Homebuilding’s collection of articles and videos will get you headed in the right direction.

 

  • Designing and Building Stairs

    Stairways can be minimal or very elaborate, but they're all based on simple geometry and accurate finish work.

  • Building a Helical Stair

    Laying out a spiral stringer with a little help from the trig tables.

  • Storage Stair

    An alternative to conventional framing takes advantage of normally wasted space.

  • Steam-bending on site

    While we were restoring a large Victorian building in San Francisco, we had to bend a lot of redwood trim around 4-ft. and 12-ft. diameter framed partitions and enclosures. Steam-bending…

  • Cutting Double-Angle Miters

    Recently the general contractor I work for was low bidder on the finish phase of a large Victorian-style office building. The job called for crown moldings, 20 raised-panel doors surrounded…

  • Baseboards for tile floors

    The cost of tile cove base is surprisingly high—about $3 to $4 per running foot. On the other hand, scribing a wooden baseboard to a tile floor is very time-consuming.…

  • Cutting curves in big beams

    Last year I designed and built a house that uses seven cantilevered 6x20 beams to hold up the second floor. The beams are exposed to view on the outside, so…

  • Inside measurements

    Finish trim work around windows or doors requires accurate inside measurements, but it's hard to get precise readings with a tape measure. The "see through" windows on some tapes don't…

  • Taper jig

    Here's a jig for a tapering a piece on a tablesaw. For the base, take a straight 1x10 or 1x12 and measure the length of the taper, squaring off the…

  • Crown molding, another way

    For cutting crown molding I use a fixture made from an ordinary wooden miter box and two 1x stops. First, find the horizontal dimension (X in the drawing) of the…

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