Kitchen Construction, Part 4 - Casing the Joint

Before

The next step in our kitchen renovation was framing out the walkway from our living room to the kitchen to create a "cased opening." Chrissy has been asking for this for years, but I was too lazy to do it until now. It turned out to be a pretty satisfying project, although painting the trim pieces was annoying, as always.

Before - The walkway looked pretty unfinished.

The first step was to remove baseboards that would be in the way. Since whoever installed the tile floor was lazy or didn't know what they were doing (or both), that meant I had to cut the grout away from the baseboards to be able to remove them.

 My oscillating multi-tool worked great for this.

 Of course the opening wasn't remotely square, so I did some scraping to minimize the problem.

The next step was to prep all the trim. I had to rip down the main boards then soften the corners with some sand paper. After that all the trim got a couple coats of bright white paint.

 The top board went in with a couple shims to level everything out.

 The side boards followed that.

Next came the actual trim boards. After everything was nailed up we filled the nail holes and touched up the paint.
We were able to find a perfect match for all the other trim in the house thanks to Moldings Unlimited. In the end, it looks much better. As usual, Chrissy was right all along.

After

After

I definitely planned for the closet door to just barely clear the new trim.

In the final photos you can see some fodder for a future post. Stay tuned.