Carpentry, trim and molding repair in Los Angeles

A lot of older LA housing is three-coat plaster over wood lath. Plaster hangs on by keys, the tongues of mud squeezed through the gaps in the lath. Score the paint line first or the finish coat comes off the wall with the base. The keys are a separate problem. Lever straight against the plaster face and you snap them for a foot above the trim, so the base comes off against a wide block bearing on a stud, in small bites down the run, or the carpentry job grows a plaster repair.

The wall is thicker than a modern one too, so a finish nail has to clear plaster and lath and still bite the stud. Two and a half inches, minimum. Shorter and you’re nailed to lath, and lath lets go.

Profiles nobody stocks

Original trim in a 1920s or 30s bungalow is vertical-grain Douglas fir or sugar pine, and it splits if the ends aren’t predrilled. What people call baseboard in those houses is often three pieces, a flat 1x8 with a cap mold on top and a shoe at the floor. Casing is flat stock with a backband and a plinth block. None of it is on a shelf anywhere, so a match means a knife ground at a millwork shop or hunting salvage. If you can spare a six inch cut-off of the existing piece, keep it for the visit. It beats ten photos.

If the paint is original

Anything built before 1978 may have lead in the paint, and prying the base off one room of a bungalow disturbs enough of it to bring in the federal lead-safe rules without trying. Past that point the work belongs to a lead-safe certified firm using containment. Tell us the age of the house up front so it lands in the estimate.

Before we price crown, the wall-to-ceiling line gets checked with a string or a long level at both ends of every run. Old ceilings wander. Where the line runs away you can roll the crown off its spring angle, or shim and fur the nailer behind it, or scribe the top edge and let the bottom float. The whole run gets set off one of those decisions, not fixed corner by corner as it goes up.

Spanish revival houses here often have coved ceilings, a radiused plaster curve from wall to ceiling with no flat face at the top. Crown won’t sit on that. Furring out a nailer turns a trim job into drywall work plus trim, and on some houses the answer is that crown doesn’t belong.

Much of LA’s 1970s and 80s apartment and condo stock has particleboard boxes with a vinyl wood-grain skin. Screws strip out of that material once, and after that the hole needs a glued dowel before a hinge holds. The exact hinge on a 1978 door often isn’t made any more, and when the pattern can’t be matched the fix is a conversion to modern concealed hinges, which means boring the doors.

Drawers

The classic failure in that same stock is the bottom-mount roller slide: the nylon rollers flat-spot and the drawer sits down on the frame. Ball-bearing side-mount slides need clear space each side, so the box gets narrowed, and undermount soft-close almost never retrofits into an old box.

Almost all the rain in LA falls between October and March, in a handful of storms, so dry rot tends to show itself in February through April, once the wood has been wet for months. The Santa Anas do the rest. Offshore gusts through the passes will take a gate off its hinges, but the wind didn’t cause that. It found the post that had already rotted off at grade.

Sprinklers are the usual culprit

Irrigation overspray is a common origin of dry rot on an LA stucco house. A head clipping the bottom of an exterior door casing, or the last foot of a fence board, keeps that wood wet daily through the dry half of the year. Repair it without moving the head and you’ve bought two years. On the coast, salt air chews through electro-galvanized fasteners in a couple of seasons, so that work gets hot-dip galvanized or stainless.

Rot or termites

These get mixed up constantly and the remedy isn’t the same. Brown rot breaks the wood into little cubes that crush to powder. Drywood termites leave smooth galleries and hard pellets under a kick-out hole, in fascia, garage jambs and baseboard. Subterranean termites, which usually get a post at the dirt line, build mud tubes up the concrete and pack their galleries with soil. Either way the wood repair is carpentry and the treatment is a pest control company’s work under its own license, so those are two separate jobs.

Closet shelves come down because the cleat was hung on plastic expansion anchors in plaster, which fail slowly and then all at once. The cleat wants studs, or toggles through the lath where there isn’t one. And three-quarter melamine sags visibly past about thirty inches with books on it.

On a stair, push the newel post first. If it moves, the anchorage at the bottom is the problem and every rattling baluster above it is a symptom. Tightening that anchorage is carpentry. Replacing the guard itself is licensed work, covered below, while a wall-mounted handrail on a stair that is already there is not.

Plenty of carpentry sits under that line. Casing one or two openings, a run of cabinet hinges, a drawer rebuild, a closet shelf re-anchored into studs, a gate rehung and braced. Other things don’t come near it. A deck, a guard or handrail replacement, and anything reaching into joists, beams, ledgers, posts or stringers is licensed, permitted work. Watch the running total too. Baseboard in one room plus a crown run plus a cabinet job reaches $1,000 faster than people expect. When a job lands on the far side of any of this, it is work for a licensed contractor, and we say so before anything is booked.

The year the house was built, and whether the trim is original to it. Whether the walls are plaster or drywall, and if you aren’t sure, a look at the wall edge behind a removed outlet cover settles it. For trim, the footage room by room, how many inside and outside corners, and an end-on photo of the profile with a tape in the shot, added to the form. Crown needs the ceiling height, and whether the ceiling is flat, coved or sloped. Count the cabinet doors and add a photo of one hinge with the door open. Outdoors, the height above grade at the tallest point.

Access is the one people leave out. A hillside lot with a long carry down a stair and nowhere to park a truck adds real time. Send it as one list, with the other small things that have been waiting, and you’ll get a firm price before the visit is scheduled.