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After my last shopping trip, I finally had the tools to remove the skirting boards from the walls of my room.
The first thing I did was run my Stanley knife along the join between wall and skirting board to loosen seal of gloss paint. Doing this gave me a little starting place to put the chisel.
Next, I hammered a chisel in between wall and skirting board to create a decent sized gap. I used the bolster chisels mainly, but sometimes, the cold chisel seemed to work better. I used two chisels at a time for those parts that were particularly reluctant to come away from the wall.
I inserted the hooky end of the big crowbar into the gap I’d created between the wall and the skirting board. I squatted down and used my HOP-squat muscles and HOP-weights muscles to pull the crowbar up, thus pulling out the nails from either the boards or the wall; I didn’t care which, as long as they came out of something.
The bigger crowbar was brilliant. It was a good weight, well balanced, and it pulled the wood away from the wall reasonably easily. I love my big crowbar.
There were columns of three 2.5″ nails every so often along the boards. They were fixed in the wood and the wall in the same way as the picture rail nails. This meant that the boards would typically come away up to that point, so I’d have to get busy with the chisels on the other side of the nail column, and repeat the process.
Each wall’s skirting board was made from one piece of wood. I got them all off the walls, except one: there was a radiator in the way. I still haven’t got a spanner to fit the nuts.
Still to do
- Remove the radiator.
- Buy a spanner that fits the nuts.
- Remove the last section of skirting board.
- Cut up all the bits of wood to a size appropriate for disposal at the tip.
