Considering another approach to skirting boards

In my post below I was talking about putting in a laminate floor - and carefully removing and replacing the same skirting boards to preserve the look of the gently aged timber.

Well my wife has now chosen the flooring material and its nothing like what I had expected. It doesnt really look like a timber at all - which is good because I generally dont like things which are one thing but trying to look like another.

So looking at it all, we think there is no choice but to put the floor down, then replace all skirting boards, and paint the (currently varnished) architraves, window frames and doors white.

She says its 'a lot of chic for very little money' - an easy position to take when its not your labour being considered.

So what I'm figuring to do now is to make the skirting boards out of the floor laminate. I've always liked the look of the floor continuing up the walls a bit - used to be done with marble floors a lot. Also done sometimes to make the rooms look bigger.

Has anyone done this and if so can you pass on what you did and anything you learnt along the way?

What I'm thinking of doing is fixing the boards to long strips of 9 or 12mm ply. Then ripping these down the middle and cleaning up the edges - giving me two boards at 90mm or thereabouts. I'll probably fix these to the wall with adhesive. Then I'll put a timber moulding on the top edge - either fixed with adhesive or nailed or both. The moulding will be painted same as the doors and architraves etc, or maybe a colour that makes a nice contrast to the floor. I could use quad, or I could run up a moulding myself which will solve several problems too complicated to go into here. Most of the joins are internals (ie scribed) and doing it this way will give me very neat joins as the complicated cutting is limited to the moulding.

Or maybe I should rip up some plywood down to about 110mm, rip the laminate to 90mm, fix the strips of laminate to the plywood, fix the moulding to the remaining 20mm. Then cut to length and fix them to the wall as one assembly. I'll have to modify the mouldings a bit to hide the top edge of the plywood, but otherwise it will be just like working with regular skirting boards.

Or maybe I should use the laminate at its full 190mm width up the wall (or maybe that will make the place look like a rat with a new gold tooth) ?

All this might sound like a lot of work, but I've found in the past that by the time you buy skirting board, give it several coats of paint, fix it with nails, fiddle with the corners, fill the holes and paint again, then its probably about the same effort.

I'm thinking of using a fast-grip liquid nails-like product for all the gluing.

Any ideas and comments or past experiences welcome ?

cheers
Arron


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