Following on from my confession about being obsessed with mouldings, I have been taking snaps of both good and bad examples that I see out and about. Here are some real howlers.
This example is kind of excusable since it was part of a quirky shop fitting in York, rather than a permanent house fixture. So it’s just a warning: If you’re going to use plinth blocks make sure they are wider than the architrave and are sanded good and smooth. Otherwise you get this, i.e. badly painted firewood.
Spotted in a holiday cottage in Salcombe. To quote Herodotus; “…for great Caesars of antiquity had sowed Torus upton Torus yet reaped only sorrow. So too their descendants”. Honestly, this is all kinds of wrong. Even if there weren’t two inexplicably stacked bits of Torus the doorway would still need a plinth block since even one piece of skirting sticks out beyond the architrave. But look! They mitred the end of one of the bits of skirting! Phew. It would have looked like a bag of shite if they hadn’t done that.
This was in a house I viewed before buying mine. The owners said it was very ‘dated’ when they bought it but they had ‘renovated it’. Hmm… this qualifies as something, but it ain’t renovation… Tragedy maybe. Ignoring the six panel door which is completely wrong for a Victorian house, why does this doorway not have proper architrave? Why does the piece at the side extend out beyond the corner of the wall? Why does the top piece not at least match the side? Were they going for an American Craftsman trim but never finished? What was the story here??
Dado rails are perhaps the easiest thing to get badly wrong. There was a fad for them in the 1990s and almost everyone placed them too high up the wall, which has a foreshortening effect that makes the ceiling look lower. This is a particularly bad move in modern houses where the ceilings already are low. Worse still, this one not only placed it too high, but someone didn’t plan ahead. Right into the window sill, doh! Just saw it off… no one will notice. Well I noticed.
Oh, come on. Terminating something is easy. There is no reason for this to happen. You either return mitre it onto the wall or, in this case, interrupt it with a block or other orthogonal object for it to butt up against. This looks like a botched Isis beheading. Plus it’s Torus. *does a bit of sick in mouth*.
OK I’ll let you in on a secret: Torus is dull as skirting, ugly as architrave, but a total eyesore as dado rail. This example is outside the mens toilet at Preston station. Talk about making a depressing location even worse. It doesn’t even match the dado rail around the rest of the corridor, which is Ogee. Could they really not be arsed to go and buy an extra bit of Ogee? And where the hell is the architrave on the left side of the door?? I should have paid more attention but I was self-conscious about taking photos right outside the gents… ahem.
I removing all the existing skirting and architrave (except around the front door which was in tolerable condition). Trivia: underneath I found some numbers inked on the door frame -I think it may be the date, as the house was built in 1879. I kept the only piece of original skirting, which I will use to fix a missing section of stair stringer later.
Having cut a dirty great hole in the wall between the back room and kitchen, it needed to be lined. Off-the-peg door linings appear to be designed only for thin stud walls, and in any case I already had a door in mind which is not a standard size. I therefore had to make my own lining. By a lucky coincidence the total thickness of the wall including plasterboard is 200mm, and I know I can buy 195mm pine boards as standard from Jewsons (£5.17 per metre). I was even able to find a length that was completely knot free! OK, this means the lining won’t be exactly flush with the plaster but I can hide the gap with architrave. I already have plenty of experience in this area from the wild and wonderful door-meets-wall variations elsewhere in the house, of which more in a later post.
The pine boards are only 22mm thick (they’re advertised as 25 x 200mm). Even though off-the-peg door lining seem to be about the same thickness, I think this is too thin to hang a heavy door off (the original linings in my house are at least 1 inch thick). The next size of timber up is 32mm which was too thick for me as it would have narrowered the door aperture too much, so I considered glueing an extra layer of plywood onto the 22mm jamb to increase the thickness. However, before I got this far I saw this image 
Next I added the header. I cut rebates in each end so it sits down on the jambs and will prevent them from cupping or trying to pull away from the wall. I nailed the header down onto the jambs and also drove some wedges in against the lintel for added rigidity against years of door banging. I then emptied an entire can of 
The layout of this house is exemplary of Victorian design. There are two reception rooms, and the kitchen is accessed down a passageway. We don’t want servants forever traipsing coal dust and offal through the good rooms, after all. How times have changed. I mostly live in the front room, which means the back reception room gets very little use while the passageway is basically a pointless bypass. An obvious modification is therefore to put a door between the back room and the kitchen and to turn the passageway into a big useful cupboard. I know at least two nextdoor houses that have done this already.
The bricks were covered in browning plaster (I guess somebody had initially intended to plaster onto the brick, but later decided to use plasterboard?) so I chipped it off and eventually found the edge of the first brick. I then drilled lots of little holes around its mortar joints. I could then drive a chisel into the joints to break it up quite easily, especially as it is old and sloppily laid lime mortar. A good whack with a hammer and the first brick was free. I continued with this until I had cleared about a meter of one course. I didn’t completely remove the central brick as the yawning gap gave me the willies, although I don’t really think there was any danger of other bricks falling down.
Well, it’s done, and it does at least look neater. I also like being able to see the state of the joists, just in case anything starts rotting one day, y’know? On the other hand there is not much standing between the cold cellar and the living room, so I decided to insulate it with some 100mm mineral wool (£22.80 from Jewsons). Top tip: saw it into segments of the width you need while it’s still in its plastic wrapper!
