Monday, January 02, 2006
Baseboards
My father offered to make me some baseboards for Christmas. Given that I’ve never one managed to saw a piece of wood in a straight line this looked too good an offer to pass up. He enjoys a bit of woodwork and, I think, gave him an nice project to occupy him over the Christmas holiday period.
So this morning he turned up with the boards which where duly put in place. Or at least they almost where. I had carefully measured the width of the room across the front of where the old desk was - where the front of the new board would be - at 94 inches, but when we assembled the boards we found that the width across the room at the wall was only 93½ inches. Oops.
Fortunately my dad is rather smarter than me and foresaw this possibility. He made the boards so that the top board overhung the ends of the framing at one end by ¼ inch. It was ten minutes work to remove the plywood backboards, cut off the end of the board and re-assemble things. This time everything fitted perfectly.
For those who are interested in these things, the framework is made of two by one timber (or whatever they call it in metric) with 12mm MDF as the baseboard. My father didn’t put quite as much framework in as I would have liked but the MDF seems fairly sturdy so should be fine.