Moulding from scratch. The details of installing moulding well, the facets of which I’m starting to get a more nuanced understanding of, is much more fussy than the average homeowner realizes. In this case, most of the jambs are recessed from the natural finish plane of the drywall. This is due to the exterior rigid insulation that was installed over the exterior sheeting of the house. This pulls the interior edge of the jamb 3/4 of an inch back from the wall. This space needs to be filled. For all the windows that require it a fillet is made and attached to the jamb edge. These fillets need to follow the contours of the wall else you get unattractive gaps between the casing and the wall. The amount of variation you have to build into the fillet depends on many things but most importantly how square and true the drywall was applied (this, in turn, is dependent on how true the framing was and also how well the insulation was put into the walls and so on). In some cases the fillets can vary as much as a half an inch from the top to bottom of an 8 foot window! Unacceptable! But you have to make it work, and that is the art of installing this stuff! What looks simple often requires multiple trips to the thickness planer, a measure and recut (or two) and in the end, sometimes a bit of bashing of drywall with a hammer gets things looking all straight and good, and that’s for just one window! 34 to go.
