Re-Finishing Original Baseboards
By: Kiersten Mcdonald
Tags: Home Decor, Home, Home Design Ideas, Baseboard Molding, Home Improvement

Our house is 75 years old and still has the original baseboards. In the past, they would have been gorgeous. About 5 inches high and definitely not something you see in new homes. Now, they’re well worn. They’ve been painted, by the looks of them, about 20 times over. When we drywalled the main floor, we carefully took the baseboards off with the idea to refinish them.

This idea is not for the faint of heart.

The process to re-finish your baseboards is:

1. Buy paint stripper, gloves, a scrubby brush with a handle, and find some old rags you’re okay with throwing away. We spend about $40 on these supplies.

2. Splash the paint stripper on the baseboards and use a rag to spread it around. After letting it soak in, scrub the baseboard. I mean really scrub it. Scrub it until your arms are tired. This is a messy, messy process. It’s a good idea to wear painting clothes, drink water, eat pasta, carb up for this marathon.

(Baseboard at the beginning of this effort with paint stripper splashed on)

3. Keep scrubbing. These baseboards had been up for 75 years. The layers of paint were gloopy and uneven in some places, and the paint stripper did help with that, but some hefty paint chips cracked and broke away from the boards. This left a noticeable crater to add to the many noticeable craters created when we took out the very long nails. The nails had been painted over many times, just like the baseboards, so when we took them out there were divots left in their place. We used silicone to plug all the holes.

4. Sand and paint. After the silicone dried, we sanded one baseboard with the hope that it would turn into a beautiful gem, a perfect piece of history preserved and restored with the craft of a professional art historian. We… we did not get that.

5. Recognize defeat and give up. For the hours and effort put in, we were desperate to see the good in the baseboards…but we just couldn’t. We couldn’t lie to ourselves no matter how hard we tried. My god, even if we squinted and kept the baseboards in our peripheral, the ugly, sloppy mess, jumped out at us.

While I was busy taking the baseboards through the house to find a light that wouldn’t show its flaws (the cold storage with a flickering bulb was just the fit) Andrew, who had been using his time productively, had found a deal on modern baseboards. 80ft of 3 ½ inch plain white baseboards cost $40 before tax.

(Left is the baseboard we’ll go with, right is our failed attempt to re-vamp our existing baseboards)

I was hesitant to move on from the original baseboards because I found them so charming and beautiful. On closer inspection, they were gloopy with paint, chipped, cracked, and a bit too well-loved. Not to mention we just absolutely destroyed them in the name of “re-finishing”.

The all in cost for our baseboards is $80. That’s a $40 lesson and a $40 new baseboard purchase. Some might consider this a DIY fail, but we’re new to a lot of these projects so we’re happy to learn these lessons. If nothing else, our attempt was a great reminder that some aspects of our house, some of the wonderful character attributes, just might not be worth saving.