roadrunnertwice | Baseboard scraps

Other random baseboard bits:

Your old baseboards had a bead of caulk up top, and you'll need to scrape the remnants off the wall. It's basically a rubbery plastic, and a small wood chisel works great for this. That set of chisels has been kind of an all-star in general, tbh. I got them to deal with replacing the deadbolt, and they've come in handy on every project since.
- The deal with replacing the deadbolt was, the old deadbolt was Too Secure. As in, it was getting so janky that one of our keys could open it but not close it, and the other could close it but not open it. We're not trying to initiate a nuclear launch, we're just trying to get in the front goddamn door, jesus.
So, why do wood floors need quarter-round shoe molding? For this, basically.
Quarter-round sticks out further than the baseboard, so wherever it's going to dead-end (like at a doorjamb) you should do something called a "return," which is basically just doing a negative-length outside corner. It looks like this. Just knowing the name should put you ahead of me; I had the vague sense something didn't add up and had to Google image search until I saw something that looked better. (Then later Ruth told me she'd already known about them but hadn't mentioned it because she assumed I'd learnt all the stuff.)
We used an 18ga (aka "brad") nailgun on both the baseboards and the shoe. I think the "pro" thing is to use 16ga (bigger) on the boards and 23ga (smaller, aka "pin") on the shoe, but this seems to be working fine. You want to nail the boards into studs, but the shoe just nails into the board so whatever. Find the studs ahead of time and put some blue tape on the floor or above the top of the baseboards.
Gotta fill in the nail holes. For natural wood you'd probably use wood filler putty, but ours are white so caulk is the move. It turns out a disposable foam earplug makes a good tool for caulking nail holes. A firm makeup sponge would probably also work, but we didn't have those handy because we're bad femmes. The hardware store dude said to use your finger, but that shit has solvents or petroleum distillates or whatever and I'm a big ol wuss about toxics. (Not that you'd fucking know it, for how often I manage to poison myself anyway.)
More relevant instagrams: pre-caulk, post-caulk, landing, jank from before we got here, the whole fukken journey.
I could probably do a whole post on caulk alone, but tbh I'm still not convinced I know the best way to do it. Ask someone else about caulk.
You'll notice The Fucking Triangle looks mostly OK, and I am not even going to talk about what that took because I feel like there's a good chance of hurting yourself if you try it and I don't want to be involved.

Finally: When I took the old baseboards off in our bedroom, I found a,

uhhhhhh,

...a live 9mm hollow-point bullet. There's treasure everywhere, my dudes.