No matter how hard you try to avoid it, outside and inside corners of sheetrocked jobs always end up with “corner boost” because of all the mud build. You can minimize it, but you cannot make it go away.
Thus, if you are trimming as we are, with northern hard maple, any boards going into corners are boosted out there and a gap is seen along the wall where the wall takes its curve.
A lot of baseboard molding profiles, slimmer than 3/4″ and relieved in back, can be pushed to track the curves, but not this stuff.
The solution is either a small cap molding (which we will not do) or painter’s caulk, which I hate to do.
What is your solution?
Replies
Since I usually do the entire job on most of my work, I feather the corners back with a wide taping knife- at least 16".
If the walls aren't painted, the taper could come back and feather out the corners. Or you could backscribe the maple to fit the wall.
I have seen a lot of corners where they only used a 6" , maybe a bit wider knife, to do the corners. And then we've gotta go in and make the trim look good. Its not bad with paint-grade, but stain-grade can be a challenge.
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Swimming through the ashes of another life, no real reason to accept the way things have changed. Wrapped in guilt, sealed up tight.
Several possibilities.
First one is to ride your drywall finisher so that the problem is minimized. Walk around the job with a 2' level and hold it against corners, and ask him how you're supposed to trim this out? He'll get the idea. Corners must be feathered out wide.
On inside corners, you can 'cope' the back of the trim with a belt sander to fit into the corner. Hold the trim in place, eyeball the fit you want, lay the trim down on the bench upside down, and sand the back with an 80 grit belt to relieve it... a little bit of a 'ski' shape. You can take a little more off the bottom than the top and then use a block plane to fine tune it.
Another way is to remove a bit of mud. Hold the trim in place, scribe along the top of it with a sharp knife. then use your 1-1/2" beater chisel to shave a little of the wall off.
On outside corners you can do the same back-relief thing, or you can shave the wall a little bit. If you have metal corner bead you may actually have to cut and remove the bottom section of the bead. I've done this once or twice where it was totally out of control. Yuck.
In either case you can simply install the trim the way you want it, leave the gap behind it, then call the drywaller back to float the wall out. I have done that more than once. Sometimes the painter is actually better at it than the drywaller.
Bottom line is that the finishers need to do a good job. If they do that then your corrective measures are minimal.
Another thing I've ocasionally done is to use trim screws to suck in the wood some more. But that only works if there's a stud where you need it.