Renovation project - How to make skirting boards, easy step by step guide

Renovation project - How to make skirting boards, easy step by step guide

Today John will be making the skirting boards for the house; this is really simple and very inexpensive. Handmade skirting boards are bigger and look better than most boards you can buy in the shops here in France.

They may not be traditional, but as traditional French skirting boards are made of tile, very small or simply do not exist this is not a problem and once finished they look in keeping with our property (and our previous property, which was a different style of House)

The wood that we bought was simply a pack of floorboards from Brico Depot (link), these cost 8 euros 20 cents for a square metre (11 euro 48 per pack) they are 2 metres long, 14 cm high and 23 mm width.

You can buy the next price up for slightly better quality and fewer knots, but this is personal preference.

There are 5 lengths in each pack, so work out how much you need beforehand.

First lay the plank on your work bench (if you are lucky, if like us, you do not possess a professional workbench, a sturdy table will suffice) attach with G clamps or similar.

Chose the router bit for your particular style of edging. 

Carefully run the router the full length of the plank.

You now have handmade skirting boards, which are exactly to your taste.

To fit screw on to the wall and use putty to hide the screw ends, as you are using tongue and grove planks, the joints are easy to fix together.

Once fitted we painted them white and the skirting boards look like they have always been there. If your property is similar to ours, you will find that the walls are not at all straight. Some boards can be pressured into place but some areas will need filling. As we are having white walls and skirting boards, this filling is easily lost..