Tocco's custom baseboards

So, the challenge was, after we got the floor leveled and new drywall up, how to hide the 1940's idea of a foundation which has a beam of redwood on top that can't be hidden by either leveling the floor and raising it up to meet the redwood nor by adding new drywall. The answer - after a few discussions with Megan - was let's build some custom baseboards that are going to wrap around the beam, while also covering them up. First I was hoping that there is something already built out there, since this is not the only house that is constructed this way, but no, nothing. Or you could do it the old-fashioned way - as they obviously did when the house was built - to just plaster them with a layer of stucco, and finished it looks like a boot, which obviously doesn't look pretty enough for our taste.

Ok, back to the drawing board. I needed to cover the 2 inches of redwood sticking out of the wall and the 0.5 inches sticking out from the ground. This means I need 2 inches for the distance and 0.5 inches in height. I could use a 2x2 inch square strip throughout, but this may not work, it gets a bit too heavy and quite tricky to mount. What I need is a kind of "L" shape, ideally in wood, with one part of the "L" that bridges the gap and the other part big enough to mount it against the board. But it also can't be too delicate and therefore useless because it may get crunched by the first touch of a vacuum cleaner. Believe it or not, as exotic it may sound, at the local hardware store they do carry something like that wooden strip in a "L" shape, each side 2 inches.

So what I basically did is, I mounted the "L" shape against the baseboards of our choice, measured everything so that we have all the pieces needed, cut them nicely with a 45° angle to fit the edges together and cut the baseboards.

With a nice brand new saw, that cuts everything in every angle you'd like - and I got the big one, since the small one I wanted was out of stock, but for customer satisfaction reasons they gave me the big one for the price of the small one, thank you HomeDepot ... ;-)

Sanding and painting, the part I like the least.

Not so much because of the dust, but it's so little rewarding, and takes so much time ...

Pre-sanded, and pre-painted, but pre-mounted to make sure everything fits nicely ...

A few additional tweaks to the DIY desk solution ...

Early phases of ownership by - as Megan calls it - her side of the desk ...

Hid the cords under the desk, to not get too messy - done! I love our new home office / basement solution, it was definitely worth the effort.