For a house whose inside you can barely see through the windows, I spent an awful lot of time on interior trim…

When the pieces slide together, there’s enough “slop” on the sides to allow for baseboards on the side walls. At the bottom, I used a piece of strip wood the same width as the floor as a spacer to position the baseboard. After gluing in both sides, I lined up the front baseboards at the corners and glued those in as well.

Upstairs was trickier. I figured out where to position these by sliding the house in halfway, sliding in the baseboards and gluing them so they were level with the floor (or so I thought), then sliding in the rest of the way and peeking through the windows to see if I got it right. It took a few tries.

With these baseboards in, it’s a little trickier to slide the house together because the first floor needs to slide in underneath the baseboard (versus before where I could slide it in higher up and then lower the house into place). I wanted the rooms to look “finished” from any angle and am not planning to take it apart often once it’s done, so I guess it’s the lesser of two evils.

The Houseworks window trim is made to go around the window frame. Usually I don’t like this and prefer to cut it down so it’s on top of the window frame, but I decided that due to the hard-to-see view through the windows, it wouldn’t be worth the extra work. Because of how the center front window is positioned above the baseboard, though, the trim needed to be cut down a little bit.

For the rest of the windows, I glued the trim around the window frame as designed. Normally the windows would stick into the room slightly and the trim would go flush around the frame. But because the house’s siding adds depth to the walls, these windows are just flush with the wall, so there’s a small visible gap around the edge of the trim and the frame.

I could have added shims to the inner edge of the trim, to hide the gap, but I didn’t feel like it and didn’t think the effort was worth it. (This process was taking long enough as it was!) On some windows you can see a dark “crack” between the window frame and the trim but it’s not something your eye is drawn to when the house is closed up.

I used a small paintbrush to paint over the seams where the window trim meets at the corners. I also tried going over the black “cracks” in the big windows with paint but they were too big to blend in. Willing to call this good enough.

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Interior trim: booooring to work on, but exciting to apply since the rooms look so complete once it’s in. It’s also the last task I have to do to finish up the Gull Bay.

I already posted pictures of the downstairs crown molding and baseboards in my last blog. For the upstairs rooms, I pulled two doors out of my stash that I’d previously painted bright white for the Fairfield, then replaced with stained doors. I sanded a bit first, then repainted with a coat of the Raw Cotton I’m using for all the trim.

The doors are slightly wider than the wall, so I added leftover mullions to the inner edge of the trim to act as shims.

For both of the doors, this is the side with the built in trim.

And here’s the opposite, shimmed side. The shim blends right in, you can’t tell it’s been added. I’ve seen posts before from people who are worried about the doors being deeper than the wall — this is a simple solution to the problem!

Added baseboards next. No weird angles and with three sides of the house open they were very easy to measure and cut, so this all went pretty quickly.

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