Finally Trim!

By now, your house has all the basics--floors, walls and ceilings.  Fun, isn't it?  Believe it or not, you're over the hump.  Yes, adding trim is time consuming, but it's also a lot of fun.  It's the part I always look forward to when I start a new house.  So now you need to ask yourself, what kind of house do I want to have?

Now, more than ever, you need to plan.  I cannot stress this enough.  Why?  First, trim is very expensive.  I bought trim yesterday for four roomboxes and a small dollhouse, and it cost me about 150.00.  You need to know, before you go into the store, what kinds of trim you want and how much of it you're going to need.  Of course, don't discount the value of in-store inspiration--one of the reasons I actually trek to New Hampshire to buy supplies instead of ordering them online is, actually handling the different products gives me new and interesting ideas.  But, one caution I have is, don't buy it if you can't envision how you're going to use it.  I have a "materials graveyard" full of fun components I have yet to find a plausible use for.  I'm sure that, someday, inspiration is going to strike...but in the meantime, I'm stuck with them.

The first thing I do is clean out the dollhouse.  Do you do it, too?  Do you leave little bits of sandpaper in the rooms you're not currently working on?  How about your brayer and x-acto blade dispenser?  Come on, you know you do.  Remove them!  Put them away!  Dust the dollhouse!  You want it clean and tidy--and empty--before you even touch your trim.  

The second thing I do is place the trim I want to use for a particular room inside that room.  Here, you want to do a little measuring.  For the crown moulding, do you need two strips or three?  Give yourself a little leeway (for cuts), not less than 2" but not more than 6".  It might seem like this procedure isn't necessary...you have a general idea of what goes where, maybe even a highly specific idea.  Do you really need to physically place everything where it's going to go, just so you can take it all back out again and cut it?  In a word, yes.  First, you're going to surprise yourself, when it comes to quantities.  You're going to need much more trim than you think in some rooms, and much less in others.  The last thing you want is to find out, half way through installing the trim, that you don't have as much as you need.  In this business, nothing is certain--sometimes manufacturers discontinue trim, and sometimes they actually change the pattern.  Once, I was working on a very elaborate roombox, and, halfway through cutting the trim, I discovered that I didn't have enough.  I ordered more of the same trim--I knew it was the same because I had the part number--from the manufacturer, but when it came, it was subtly different.  Much to my dismay, I learned that the manufacturer now cut that pattern out of a shallower blank.  The two trims, the old and the new, didn't match--I had to start again from scratch.  Second, you're going to get confused.  It gets harder and harder to remember, as time goes on, what trim goes where.  Trust me on this!

Now, grab some rubber bands and some sticky notes.  Gather up the trim for each room, one at a time, and gently bundle it together.  If the rubber band is too tight, then it can cut into the wood.  Write the name of the room on a sticky note, and slip it inside the rubber band.  Now, put the trim bundles aside.  I favor small plastic wastebaskets from Target for this purpose--they're cheap and useful, an awesome combination.  As you work on each room, you can take the trim bundle in question out of the wastebasket and use it.  This is a great method if you want to maintain a certain level of organization.  I often work with expensive supplies, or work on multiple projects at the same time, so organization is essential for me.  

A note on scrap wood: I keep two separate containers for scraps, one for basswood strip scraps and one for trim scraps.  Often, a particular piece of wood is too short for my current project, but perfect for a future project.  Wood is very expensive, so I try to get as much bang for my buck as I can.