Trim and Finish Carpentry in Cary, NC

The trim profile in an addition does not match the rest of the house, or baseboard has a visible gap at every inside corner. Those are the calls we take most often from Cary homeowners, and neither one improves on its own.

RK Renovation handles trim and finish carpentry across Cary and the rest of Wake County and Chatham County. Crown molding, wainscoting, coffered ceilings, built-ins and stair details, scribed to the walls you actually have rather than the ones on a plan.

What the price covers

• Material selection. Paint grade poplar, finger jointed pine or MDF for painted trim, and stain grade poplar, oak or a hardwood matched to your floors when the grain is meant to show, chosen before a single board is cut.
• Blocking and rough carpentry. Horizontal blocking added behind the drywall for anything that will eventually hang there: a built in, a mounted television, floating shelves or a heavy mirror, decided before the wall closes rather than after.
• Base, casing and crown installation. Inside corners coped rather than mitered, casing and base scribed to the actual wall, and outside corners mitered tight with a nailing schedule that keeps them that way.

Trim and Finish Carpentry in Cary, in practice

Almost no wall in a Cary house built before the 2000s is actually straight, and finish carpentry lives or dies on how the trim handles that fact. At inside corners we cope one piece of baseboard or crown to fit over the profile of the other rather than cutting two forty five degree miters, because a coped joint stays tight even as the two walls move independently through a Wake County summer and winter. Where casing meets a wall that bows or leans, we scribe the edge to follow the actual surface instead of trusting a factory straight edge. The extra time at the saw is what keeps a hallway of trim reading as one continuous line instead of a series of small visible steps.

Wood trim in a Cary home moves with the seasons, expanding somewhat in the humidity of a Carolina summer and contracting in a dry heated winter, and a good installation plans for that instead of fighting it. Paint grade material, usually finger jointed pine or MDF, is stable, inexpensive and disappears completely under two coats of paint, which makes it the right call for most baseboard, casing and crown. Stain grade material, solid poplar, oak or a hardwood matched to existing floors, shows every joint and grain line, so it costs more in both material and labor and demands tighter joinery. We leave a hairline gap at long butt joints in Wake County projects either way, because solid wood caulked bone tight in January can buckle by August.

Questions from Cary homeowners