Recreating Historic Exterior House Trim – It’s A Process!

Recreating historic house trim on the exterior of a house. If ever there was a labor of love, this is it.

We own a really old home. The oldest section dates back to the 1780s and it has been added onto since. Like many homes of that era, the exterior trim is ornate, beautiful, and rotten in spots.

whomp, whomp

Guess what most contractors want to do in this situation?

Gold stars if you answered, “Take it down and replace it with something you can get off the shelf.”

In essence, make it look like every other house on the block.

I will also award gold stars if you answered, “They don’t even want to take this project on.”

Most contractors that I’ve encountered don’t come out and directly say that though. They just shake their head and say something about how expensive and time-consuming that would be to recreate.

I’m going to tell you a little secret.

We don’t want to take this project on either, but there is no one left.

If not us, who? If not now, it could get worse and cause costly problems. This house will not fall down on our watch if we can help it.

On one section of our house, the exterior trim stack around the roofline is built with seven different trim pieces. On a different section, it has three different pieces. Either way, it creates an impressive stack.

In our situation, the rotten areas of trim seem to be contained to the eaves at the end of the gables. This is an area where moisture can sit on the trim caps. The situation could have been exacerbated by gutter issues over the years.

Or maybe the trim just reached the end of its lifespan. It happens to the best of us.

As you can see, when we pulled off this section of rotten trim, it was nailed to the house with square nails. Those fell out of favor in the late 1800s when cheaper wire nails were invented.

To recreate the historic trim, we started out by trying to see if we could find this trim profile anywhere.

That was a big fat fail, but we had to try.

Then we thought about how a carpenter would have made this trim in the 1800s. There were no power tools then. No electricity. Thousands of linear feet of exterior trim would have been cut with hand tools.

Hand. Tools. By. Hand. Now, THAT’s a labor of love.

We only need to make 20 feet or so of trim (thank goodness) and we don’t think we have the skills to do that small amount by hand. Some of you might though and I tip my hat to you. That kind of craftsmanship should be celebrated with a parade.

We chose to try and recreate the historic trim on our house with power tools, specifically our router, bandsaw, table saw, and sander.

We bought new router bits (we like the Yonico bits) that most closely mimicked the curves of the crown trim specifically. It took two passes through the router with different bits to recreate the curved parts of the trim.

We used the table saw to cut the angle on the back of the trim.

A digital angle finder with a magnet on the bottom helps take the guesswork out of setting the saw blade precisely.

You can see in the picture below how we’re using the old trim as a guide to make sure we are getting the angle exact.

Of course, we still had to sand the trim.

We were getting close to recreating this historic trim but not perfect.

This is where the practice comes in. The original trim was made out of cedar, which we will do as well.

Our practice pieces were made with other types of scrap wood we had in our shop.

We made several practice pieces and then realized something disappointing.

This exterior trim was cut by hand, so there are variations in the size.

It was hard to tell from the ground but there are certain sections of our exterior trim that had been repaired over the years and don’t quite match anything else.

It’s a trim mash-up!

So, making one template from one rotten piece doesn’t necessarily mean that the template will work for all the trim we need to replace.

What do you do then?

The best you can.

You do the best you can. We may have to throw the template out of the figurative window.

We plan to rent a lift to get us to the top of the gables as safely as possible. We’re limiting ourselves to a week to work on this project because lifts are expensive to rent. Not as expensive as hiring someone to do this work, but we could take a nice vacation.

Speaking of vacation, we have to take days off work to do this work. There are time, financial, and weather constraints on this project, so we will do the best we can to work as efficiently as possible.

The actual hardest part of this process so far is finding a lift to rent. At the time I’m writing this, none are available in our area and we are quickly running out of favorable weather before winter sets in.

If there is anything this house has taught us, it is to be flexible. We may have to make some adjustments as we go, but we know the new trim we eventually create will be pretty close to the original. It will certainly honor the spirit of this old house better, in our opinion as old house lovers, than replacing it with something available at the home improvement store.

I’ll share an update as soon as I have one!

Have you ever had to replace your exterior house trim? How’d it go? Let me know. I love it when you comment on this blog post. You can also email us here, or reach out via Instagram or Facebook.

Happy DIYing!

Thanks for being here today! If you like old houses you might enjoy one of these blog posts.

4 Old House Construction Techniques We Found When We Replaced Siding

3 Reasons Old Houses Might Have Stones Between the Studs

All About Our 240-Year-Old Pumpkin Pine Floors

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