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How to Make a Good Return on Skirting Boards

Are you stumped on a blunt end where the skirting board meets an unframed doorway? For a more elegant finish to this dilemma, use a return.

There are just some times when no matter how well you do a carpentry project, you are faced with a challenge that can ruin the whole project if you do not find a way to get around it. Take for example installing new skirting boards in a room. What if you encounter a point where your skirting boards meet a doorway that is not fitted with a door frame, such as the door of a built-in closet? How do you deal with that challenge?

If you want, you can simply saw off the end of the skirting boards where they meet the unframed door. It should not matter so much, and no one would really notice. Or would they? We are not really aware of it, but people do notice the baseboards. They can attract attention even if we do not want them to.

So, how would you deal with this challenge of fixing skirting boards as they meet unframed doors? The answer is to create a good return on your boards.

Making a return on your boards is a simple, yet elegant way of finishing the boards when they meet a point where they do not intersect with a corner or a door frame. Normally, when the baseboards meet door frames, they are just fitted against the frame so they look as if they flow against each other. With corners, it is a simple way of making a mitre cut on the baseboard.

The return is actually similar to a mitre cut, except that you only cut a joint of the baseboard to square the whole thing off. Thus, how do you do it?

First, you take a couple of skirting boards and measure their mitre angle, just as you would with the mitre cut that you need for joining external corners with baseboards. To get the mitre angle in a return, you just need to cut at a 45-degree angle on both boards. When you join them, you get a perfect, 90-degree angle.

After you are done making the mitre cuts, you trace the width of one baseboard against the other right from the angle of the mitre cuts. Use a pencil to draw the line. Once you have drawn the line, you can take the baseboard you have sketched on to your worktable and use a saw to cut along the drawn line. What you should come up with is a small, triangular wedge of wood.

And then, you attach this wedge of wood to the skirting board you will be installing. You can nail them together, but it is a lot neater and cleaner to just use wood glue on them. Besides, nailing a piece of wood so narrow will only see you hurting yourself in the process. The result is much cleaner and much more elegant.
Doing a return on skirting boards is a simple and easy task of putting a more polished finish to your skirting boards when they meet unframed entryways. Try them on your next carpentry project.

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For more tips and tricks on skirting boards and carpentry in general, please visit Skirting Boards .com.

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