The most satisfying bit

Over the past few years I've worked hard on our home renovation, with all the bits I've written about in detail before like the bedroom, bathroom & lounge and the bits I don't think I've written about, like the garden and dining room.

But when I think back, I've done so much work yet there's one bit which is the most satisfying, and it might not seem that obvious - it's the skirting on the stairs.

So often houses have skirting which meets the stairway in a disjointed mess at both top and bottom, and our house was no exception - I had a real urge to fix it.

A couple of things had to be done to make it possible for the skirting to match on the stairs and the landing. The stringer, which runs up the wall alongside the stairs, was fractionally shallower than the depth of the skirting, so I couldn't mount skirting board on to it. This meant I had to create the profile of the skirting board from scratch on the stairs.

I did this by firstly raising the height of the stringer with a 1cm square piece of wood placed on top. Then to increase the depth of the stringer to the depth of the skirting it would meet with, I used sections of 3mm hardboard, cut out around the profile of the stairs. A little fiddly! Then, the final piece was to match the torus skirting - which I did by simply removing the torus part from sections of skirting board, and gluing to the top of my new stair-skirting. 

To meet the skirting at the top and bottom of the stairs, I had to measure and bisect the angles for each piece of skirting to correctly align.

All joining areas of wood and hardboard were filled with Polyfilla Wood and sanded for a smooth finish. There's been no movement since, so no cracks and the finish has remained smooth.

The fact I like this so much probably has something to do with who I am - being able to create a seamless flowing line of skirting board from the hallway, up the stairs, and around to the upstairs landing was just extremely satisfying.