Help with Door Casing

stradt03

Hello everyone, I'm adding chair rail and door casing in my dining room. The entrance is an open walk way (~8ft wide 7ft high).

Problem is that the house was trimmed up with base and shoe molding and I need some ideas on how to run the casing. It looks goofy just sitting on top of the base.

Help! What's the proper way to handle this?

Duckweather

Usually casing is installed before baseboard. In your case, to make it look right, one of the new oscillating saws would be a good investment. You can get a fairly good one for less than $100.00. Practice first and they can be tremendously accurate. A guide block tacked on for a guide helps cut a nice smooth straight line.

stradt03

That's kind of what I was thinking. Any thoughts on what to do with the baseboard on inside of the opening?

chitownken

Do the same and extend the board on the inside of the opening all the way to the floor. It should look just like a door jamb without the stop.

Duckweather

We are assuming you were going to use a jamb there too.

joecaption

Why are you running baseboard on the inside of the jamb? Not the way it's done in most cases.
The jambs were suppost to be under cut and the flooring run under the jambs so there's no gaps.

mae-ling

It's a drywalled opening that will be changed to trimmed.

stradt03

mae-ling is right. see the attached pic for a better look.

scottktmrider

I would say take the base off,put the casing up than cut your base to the casing.Looks like the base is fairly short pieces anyway.Plus if you cut it in place it will be hard to cut the base shoe with out screwing the floor up.

chrisBC

edited