Improvise Trim for French Doors

Improvisation works for jazz and McGyver, so why not me, right?

After installing the French Doors in this post, we met a problem when it came to trimming between the doors and the windows. Mullion trim would be perfect, except that I couldn't find any that was the right width for this project. Further, we needed a skinny piece to run across the top of the door to match.

What to do? Time to go custom...

For our purposes, it really didn't need to be fancy. I wanted to start with a thin board and round over the edges. A typical 1x4 would be 3/4" thick which is still too much. Instead, I bought some wider pine baseboard and ripped off the decorative edge with my table saw to leave me with a 3" board that was only about 1/2" think. Perfect!

Next I used my router to round the edges and then sanded them down as you can see in the picture. Once the boards had been transformed into decorative mouldings, I was ready to install them as usual.

This was the last piece of this puzzle. It was time to putty and caulk all those seams! Fight that temptation to skip the caulk, even with a brand new door installation. The caulk makes everything look seamless so that instead of looking at gaps you can enjoy the new door.

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com