Baseboard & Plinth Upgrades
One-piece and two-piece baseboard scaled to the room, joined tight at the corners with precision fit and polish, and scribed to the floor you actually have.
Baseboard is the trim people look at most without realizing it, because it runs the entire perimeter of every room at eye level when you are sitting down.
Height and scale
Baseboard height relates to ceiling height and to the casing it meets. A three-and-a-quarter-inch base that suits an eight-foot room looks undersized at ten feet, and base that is shorter than the casing it dies into creates an awkward step at every door.
Where the room warrants it, base gets built up in two pieces — flat stock with a separate cap — which gets the height and the profile up without paying for an enormous single moulding. One-piece 1x6 or 5-1/4” speed base covers most rooms cleanly.
Where base meets door casing, a plinth block gives the transition a clean, finished edge instead of the base awkwardly butting or coping into the casing leg.
Scribing to the floor
Floors are not level, and they are especially not level in a room that has been re-floored. A straight piece of base set on a floor that falls half an inch across twelve feet will either rock off the wall or leave a wedge-shaped gap.
The fix is scribing: transferring the floor’s actual contour onto the bottom edge of the base and cutting to it. The result sits tight along its whole length with no shoe moulding needed to hide anything — though shoe is still the right answer on some floors, and we will tell you which.
Corners and fastening
Inside corners are cut as a tight, stable joint, for the same reason as crown: it closes on itself as the wood moves, where a mitered one opens. Outside corners get glued and pinned so they cannot creep apart.
Fastening depends on what is behind the drywall. Wood framing is straightforward. Masonry and concrete — common on slab-on-grade ground floors around here — needs the right fastener rather than a longer nail, or the base works loose within a year.