Today was a lot of finishing touches.

The piece of cornice was added to the side, at the end of the very last Ikea Billy unit.

Filler was used top and bottom of the cornice to seal it in properly. This included sculpting the corners of the cornice. I know most people don’t notice (or are even aware of) cornice, but if you ever come to my house, please appreciate this. It took a lot of time and I’m quite proud of it.

We also worked on the finishing touches at the bottom of the Ikea Billy units. Dad had this idea of boxes and the base of the gap between each bookshelf. I really couldn’t visualise what he’d been trying to explain, but knew it would be in keeping with the NSW Colonial style of my cottage and that dad had a vision he wanted to see out. Personally, I had no idea how to properly finish the bottom and was secretly very curious to see what he’d com up with.

Using 12mm MDF this time (it really is a very easy material to work with) and the help of some amazing power tools, several boxes were built, each with three pieces and perfectly cut 45-degree edges. Once we could hold the first box in place, I knew dad was onto something. The rest went in pretty quickly, with dad cutting and me gluing the pieces in place.

But the boxes aren’t the only part required to finish the bases of the Ikea Billy units; we also needed skirting board.

Time to once again look around the room you are currently in. Like cornice, there is often a joiner piece which conceals the gap between the floor and the base of the wall. That’s the skirting board. Often, this is a simple profile with standard dimensions. Except in a Colonial style cottage. The skirting boards in my lounge room are 12.5cm high (ridiculously big) and have a lovely sculpted pattern to them (beautiful, until you have to try and match it). The particular profile in my house isn’t readily available, but there are others like it. We decided that as long as it was in keeping with the rest of the house, it would blend. So, while I’d been ordering long pieces of timber and cornice from the hardware the other day, I also bought the new version of NSW Colonial style skirting board which was 14cm high. This had to be cut down, but having extra height meant we could better accommodate the variations in the floor (remember, old houses have funny curves where you think things should be flat).

In the end, all ten of the skirting board pieces were cut individually to its own measurements and glued into place.

Lots of fiddly bits today, but how great does it look?