Grand Finishes For Carpentry: A Step-by-Step Guide Through Molding Installation Projects

Whether you want to learn tricks of the trade or just the basics, Grand Finishes for Carpentry can help make your home carpentry project a fun, simple, and rewarding experience. In this easy-to-understand instruction manual, Matt Nikitas takes both the unskilled beginner and the seasoned pro through molding installation, with emphasis on each step of the process and the tools it takes to give you the home you've always wanted.

Beginning with the five joints--butt joint, outside miter, coped joint, scarf joint, and mitered return--Nikitas lets uninitiated readers and do-it-yourselfers understand what they'll be constructing, and where and why. But even the seasoned home carpenter will find valuable tips, entertaining on-the-job stories and important advice (should you invest in a chop saw? a pneumatic nail gun?) that can help anyone make all the right decisions about molding installation.

Grand Finishes for Carpentry also offers an in-depth description of the various items that make up the carpenter's toolbox for molding installation, including chisels, planes, the hammer, nail set, the saws, files and rasps, T-bevel, and try square.

Just a few of the topics this guide covers:
* how to assess and purchase the molding stock
* base moldings in your home: both single-piece and multiple-piece
* quick and easy picture molding installation
* wainscotting design
* did moldings appear first as ornament or necessity?
* wood and its durability
* multiple-piece crown moldings
* the three carpenters: the Framer, the Millworker, and the Interior Finisher
* various window header configurations
* MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard)
* installing base and crown moldings on uneven surfaces
* cutting odd inside and outside corners (other than forty-five degrees)
* "greasing" the nail
* finishing with paint or stain and polyurethane

Matt Nikitas hosted and produced a public access television program called The Power of Positive Painting and appears regularly on Lifetime, HGTV, and the Discovery Channel. His contracting career spans seventeen years spent in Northern California and New York. He lives and works in New York City.