PrairieMod Monday

It's getting closer! We're finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with regard to the "model room" in the little red house. This weekend saw some great progress towards completing what will our aesthetic blueprint for the rest of the house.

Here's what happened this week inside our Mid-Century modern ranch, affectionately referred to as "the little red house."

We started our day by removing the rest of the painted-over trim from inside the closet. We then installed the new base and quarter round utilizing the "soldier" technique illustrated in last week's post.

To finish off some irregular spots like tight corners and a bump-out area near the door, we utilized some tricks. It would be a little too tight to try and get a soldier, base piece and quarter round in once of the corners. In instances like this, we use a piece of oak stock the same thickness and height as a "soldier" piece, only we cut it the width of the space needed to be filled. This is done to unify the overall look desired from the trim design (the form), while still being functional.

Another area we had to think about was an area near the inside bottom of the closet door area. There, a bump out portion of the wall interferes with where the case trim would normally run. So we cut and merged two pieces from the same piece of case trim together to make it appear seamless but it's actually 2 separate pieces. These were the decisions we made to try and save us a little shop time and the trouble of dealing with little tiny pieces.

One of the things you deal with a lot in an old house is that there are no strait and true angles or corners. You  get a lot of gaps. These gaps look especially bad when you're dealing with white painted areas. To take care of this issue, we utilize paint-able caulk to seal the gaps and make everything appear seamless.

One curious aspect to the boards circling the ceiling is that in some of the corners don't line-up. This causes a visual "hiccup" if your eye catches it.

To correct this issue, we used a very sharp chisel and trimmed off the "hiccup" making the line of the trim appear seamless. (You can see we still need to do some final touch-up painting in the room.)

So why worry about all these little details? It's very important to consider the big picture when designing the plan for your house. You have to know what the big goals are. However, the magic is almost always in the details. All the little things in a closet, a room and a house add up to big impressions. The little things show the love poured into the design. Until next week!