Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Putting on the Finish Touches

5871 Churchill Way is nearing the end of its construction phase. Since installing our cabinets and doors, we have added trim on our window sills, door frames, and base trim. In addition, all of our appliances have been delivered and installed. Currently, we are in the midst of our last major project: our bamboo staircase with built-in bookshelves, which you will hear more about on another day. For today's post, we have a quick summary of the installation of our trim and appliances.

A large pile of trim which kept us busy for a few days
For our house's trim we used board lumber manufactured from hemlock that varied in size between long lengths of 1x3 for beneath the window sills to a 14 ft. length of 1x10 for the base trim of our staircase. In addition, we used 1x4 for our door casing, 1x6 for our base trim, and 3/4" red oak plywood for our window sills.

The first section of house that was covered with finished trim were our doors. The trim around our doors is referred to as casing and consisted of two side pieces and a length over the top known as a head casing.

Before trim

After trim

After we had finished casing our interior doors we moved to installing base trim. In the upstairs of our house, the base trim was set a half inch off the ground to leave room for carpet and downstairs was set right on top of the bamboo flooring.

Base trim in the master bedroom
Door casing and base trim in the guest bedroom
Guest bedroom door after door casing was installed. In the background, base trim is being installed.


Being a smaller house, the base trim and door casing took little over a day's work of work and once they were finished we moved over to finishing the windows with trim. For this, we cut out lengths of  3/4" plywood with a red oak face and back veneer to fit in the deep window sills. Once the plywood pieces were in place, we added a piece of 1x3 hemlock on the underside of the plywood. Once fastened, we gave the pieces 3 three coats of lacquer to help protect the product.


Construction Manager, Justin Fantasia, installing 3/4" red oak plywood for window trim
Finished window sill

After the trim in the house was installed, we moved on to the installation of appliances that had been delivered a few days earlier. Included in that installation were all the usual suspects: a refrigerator, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and microwave that doubles as a  range hood. Installation of the appliances was rather straightforward and took approximately half a day.

Washer, removed from its package and ready for installation

Kitchen view before appliance installation
Kitchen view after installation of microwave and stove

Cross section of cut-out wall for installation of vent hood.