Jenn Martinelli Blogging in Boston

Hey guess what everyone? I'm almost in love with our plaster walls, which I completely fucking hated about a week ago. Why? Because my feelings for the awfulness of working with plaster pale in comparison to my feelings about how ridiculously effing difficult it apparently is to install baseboard molding.

I mean, did you know about coping? Yeah. Me neither. Here are a bunch of links about it:

Reader's Digest baseboard coping step by step (This is probably the most thorough explanation and best photos I've found.)

Extreme How To coping tight joints

EHow coping baseboard with a sabre saw

And, if you want to feel like an idiot, as I did after watching this, please view the little video on Bob Vila's site where the guy making a coping joint does it in like 32 seconds perfectly: Bob Vila cutting and installing baseboard video.

OK. So, this whole situation makes me wish I was instead putting up a new plaster wall rather than baseboard. Or maybe thinking I should dump Rob Reed and hook up with a master carpenter stat. (No offense Rob Reed.) It's super frustrating.

Even with as complicated as the coping of the "profile" looks in all the photos and video, I am relatively confident that this part wouldn't be too difficult to do. We do have a coping saw with several different "fineness" grades of blades, as well as sandpaper and a wood file. However, because we don't have a table saw, we could really use a miter (I've seen "miter" spelled both "miter" and "mitre" so I just picked one) box to make the initial 45 degree angle in order to "expose" the profile that I'm supposed to follow with the coping saw.

OK, so maybe we can get past that because we can just kind of draw an outline of the profile of another block of baseboard and cut along that line. Not as neat and quick, but doable.

Next problem: I'm also supposed to cut a 30 degree - 45 degree angle anywhere two joints of baseboard butt up against each other along a straight wall, as in this illustration:

This means I really need to have a good clean matching angle on both pieces obviously. Which brings me back to needing a miter box.

The problem? Oh, all the "cheap" miter boxes we can find, such as this one or this one only accommodate a piece of wood up to 5" wide. And our baseboard is 6" wide/tall. Now, had I known this frustration was coming up, we would have bought slightly smaller baseboard. But that's not an option now. OK, so why not buy the nicer, more expensive miter boxes? Oh, because they don't give you a way to cut on that plane. I need to be able to make the below cut (excuse the rather hasty illustration):

See how this miter box won't let me do that?:

OK. See how the cheap ones would, if only they were big enough?:

OK. Well, they're not. When I asked an employee at Home Depot what I should do instead, he recommended "eyeballing" the angle.

Seriously, I need all this work to be done. It's so frustrating. Comments aren't working on my blog so if you have any tips, please email me!