I just can’t get down on my knees and work like I used to so I decided I would take off all the 7-inch oak baseboards and refinish them on the table instead of working on the floor. I hesitated doing this because when I removed a baseboard a few years ago, the plaster came with it and it required a lot of fixing.

So this time I was very careful, slowly working the nails out with spatula first then crowbar making sure I put pressure where the nail was in a stud as not to break the plaster. They don’t make nails like they used to. These are the strongest nails I’ve ever encountered. I don’t see why they thought they had to put such big nails in just holding up the baseboards. I took two sections off which resulted in only one night of back agony. (better than 6 months of a bad knee.)

As you can see in the above photo, under the baseboard the plaster doesn’t go all the way to the floor. I’ll fill that in before reinstalling the baseboards to be sure there aren’t any drafts as that is an outside wall.

On the backside of the baseboards are two grooves cut into the wood. They put them in on the backsides of large pieces to keep them from warping. Never hammer the nails back out as you’ll splinter the wood on the front side (especially on oak.) With these big nails it was impossible for me to pull them through from the backside (recommended if possible) without some kind of specialty tool so I’m cutting them off flush to the wood with my Dremel and a diamond cutting blade. It takes too long on big nails to cut all the way through them so I just score them on one side flush with the wood and then bend the nail back and forth towards the score mark and they break off at the weakest point, the score mark. Newer nails break easily, older nails are much stronger and take just a bit more bending back and forth. After they break off, I lightly file the end if there is a sharp edge. For the 8 nails on this 4-ft length it only took about 2 minutes for all of them. See method in short video clip below.

Click to play

I used a card scraper (flat metal piece shown above) to get as much finish as I could off before using the sander. The old shellac is hard to sand off because the friction heat causes the shellac to ball-up (or corn) your sandpaper. I use less sandpaper by using the card scraper first. I didn’t want to use stripper this time because it is just more work and takes longer and most of the time leaves a residue that is hard to get out of the pores. Stripper is good for intricate moldings, though. Some people will take the woodwork off and run it through a planer to get all the old finish off. You’d have to make really sure there isn’t any nails left in the wood doing it that way. I think it would take too much wood off and change the look of the piece. If I had a planer, maybe I’d give it a try, though.

In the next few days I’ll finish the two baseboards I took off and reinstall them. I’ll post photos in my next entry.