Baseboards, Nosing & Thresholds

Check out our finished floors!

It's been about three months since I posted anything. I don't really have an excuse. We haven't been busy redoing our kitchen or away on a fabulous vacation. I took a little blogging break but I'm back and I'll be posting about stuff that happened months ago. Better late than never right?

Back in December I shared our flooring progress. Even though we finally had gotten around to actually laying down the floors we still had work to do. As much as Jonathan and I both wished that laying the actual flooring down would have been the whole project it wasn't. We still needed to install baseboards, stair nosing and thresholds.

In same ways this was the more diffcult part. First of all, choosing our baseboards was really hard. We wanted to get some that were on the taller side to cover up the damage our leaky fridge caused. There are so many options and I was having a hard time visualizing how it would all turn out. Once I picked them out we had to get them home. Neither one of us has a car big enough to fit them (they are 16 feet long) so we had to borrow my dad's. Jon and I also liked the look of a thicker baseboard. Baseboards only come in certain measurements so to create the effect we decided to add quarter round in front. Then everything had to painted and obviously it didn't just need one coat.

After all the prep work was done Jon could start measuring, cutting and nailing everything in. Since we had only purchased a little bit more than we needed he had to be really careful with his cuts. Jon and my brother went around the room installing the baseboards. My mom and I followed with caulk to cover all the nail holes and to fill the gaps along the top and at the corners. Then we did the same thing with quarter round. This part probably would have taken us forever to accomplished if we hadn't borrowed a nail gun and air compressor.

We did all of that the weekend before Thanksgiving. Since we were getting ready to host (for the first time!) we had to get it all done before our guests arrived. So we were up super late every night that week. And we still weren't done.

Our living room has a little step down and Jon decided to install nosing there. First he had to cut, line and adhere the laminate pieces against the step. Then he could proceed with the nosing. It looks like the curved part of a stair tread and had to be glued down. This meant we had to be sure the flooring we had laid down was perfectly aligned on both edges of the step. If it wasn't done right then the nosing would be off. Jon cut it, applied tons of glue and laid it down carefully. Then we held it place trying to move it move it at all. This took forever since we had to work in sections.

You can also see the threshold pieces Jon installed in between the living room and kitchen. That part was pretty easy. He cut them to size and pushed them. He added a little bit of adhesive to prevent them from lifting up.

We went to bed at 3am that night (Wednesday night/ Thanksgiving morning). Jon got up early Thanksgiving morning to finish installing one section of baseboard and then started on the turkey. It was a mad dash to the finish line but it so worth it. My mom came over to help to me clean and remove all the dust and we finished with just enough time to serve dinner.

Looking back we probably should have started this project a little bit earlier but I'm so glad we had them done in time. Our home looks so much more warm and inviting. Such an improvement over the old white tile.