Skirting

Also called: skirting board, baseboard

Skirting is a board fixed along the bottom of an internal wall, running where the wall meets the floor. Because floors are seldom flat or true, much of the skill in fitting it lies in shaping its lower edge, and its ends, to follow whatever they run into.

Cutting and fitting

A length of skirting is cut and jointed, then offered up and test-fitted in position before it is finally fixed. Where a run is longer than any single board to hand, two lengths are joined end to end with a heading joint. The skirting's lower edge is usually scribed to the floor: a line is drawn on the board following the floor's irregularities, and the board is then cut to that line, rather than tongued into a groove in the floor. Riley (1905) described this as 'the method of cutting the lower edge of a skirting board to fit the slight irregularities of the floor (instead of tonguing the board to the floor) is also known as scribing.' The same kind of marking is used elsewhere in fitting the board: a line is drawn parallel to a reference edge at the projection needed to set where the skirting's lower part should sit, the height is marked on it, and the piece is notched out to fit.

Fixing it in place

Where skirting stands proud of the wall face rather than sitting flush with it, its lower edge is sometimes seated into a groove cut into the floor to take it. A separate capping moulding, a small shaped strip, can be fixed along the top of the skirting, in the same way a dado's base is capped. On certain modern types of building block, cut clasp nails, nails with a wedge-shaped head that grip the block without a plug or screw, can be driven straight in, and will hold light-section skirting well enough to speed up fixing. In window-back construction, where a lower rail rests on the ground, its joint is hidden by the skirting moulding, leaving the window back free to expand and contract.

Skirting at the stair

On a staircase, skirting continues up the wall as a wall string, the sloping board fixed to the wall that follows the line of the stair in place of ordinary skirting. Its angle joints, where it turns, are tongued and grooved, and its upper and lower ends are eased, trimmed, to correspond with the width of the skirting board. A stringer, the board that carries the ends of the stair's steps, can also be widened to meet the skirting: its outer edge is shaped as an arc that runs tangent to, touching without crossing, the top edge of the skirting, and can be worked from a single piece or built up from several, depending on the width of timber to hand. On cheap-grade work, skirting is simply cut with butt joints to fit over the treads and risers.