Carpentry, trim and molding repair in Los Angeles

Roughly half the housing in the City of LA predates 1960, and a lot of that 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, send that. It beats ten photos.

If the paint is original

Anything built before 1978 may have lead in the paint. The federal RRP rule applies once work disturbs more than six square feet of interior painted surface in a room, and prying the base off one room of a bungalow clears six without trying. Past that, the work belongs to an EPA Lead-Safe Certified firm using containment. Tell us the age of the house up front so it lands in the estimate.

Before anyone prices 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 honest 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 hinges are usually semi-concealed or wraparound face-frame types. Those still get made, but the overlay, the crank and the finish on a 1978 door often don’t exist any more, and one odd hinge in a run of twelve is the hard part. When the pattern can’t be matched, the fix is a 35mm Euro cup conversion, which means boring the doors.

Drawers

The classic failure in that same stock is the bottom-mount epoxy roller slide. The nylon rollers flat-spot and the drawer sits down on the frame. Side-mount ball bearing slides need half an inch of clear space each side, so the box gets narrowed. Undermount soft-close almost never retrofits, since it wants 5/8 inch sides and a grooved bottom an old box doesn’t have.

Almost all the rain in LA falls between October and March, about fourteen inches in an average year, 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 leaves cubical checking, where the wood breaks into little cubes and crushes to powder. Drywood termites need no soil contact, so they turn up in fascia, garage jambs and baseboard, leaving smooth galleries and hard six-sided pellets under a kick-out hole. Subterranean termites are the other one, and they’re what usually gets a post at the dirt line. They need contact with the ground, so they build mud shelter tubes up the concrete or the face of the post, and the galleries are packed with soil instead of pellets. Either way the wood repair is carpentry and the treatment is Branch 3 structural pest control work under a different license, so those are two separate jobs.

The permit line on decks

In the City of LA the permit exemption for a deck is narrower than people think. It has to be 200 square feet or less, no more than 30 inches above grade at any point, not attached to the house, and not serving the required exit door. Bolt it to the house and it needs a permit at any height, including a 12 inch platform. The 30 inches that triggers a guard is measured to the grade or floor below at any point within 36 inches horizontally of the edge, so on a hillside lot in Silver Lake or Mount Washington a deck two feet up at the door is well past that at the far end. LADBS counts repairing a guard or railing as a modification too, which pulls a permit on its own.

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. California guard rules run stricter than the model code. A landing or walking surface more than 30 inches up wants 42 inches of guard where the model code allows 36. On the open side of the stair itself, where the top of the guard doubles as the handrail, it drops to 34 to 38 inches, so a 42 inch guard built up the flight puts the grip above legal height. Guards generally pass no 4 inch sphere. On stairs the open side takes 4-3/8, and the triangle under the bottom rail takes 6.

California has a narrow exemption that lets some minor work be done without a CSLB contractor license. It’s Business and Professions Code section 7048, and there’s more to it than the money. All of this has to hold at once. The work is casual, minor or inconsequential. Labor, materials and everything else added together come to less than $1,000. No building permit is required. And the job isn’t one piece of a larger project, and hasn’t been split into smaller contracts to stay under the number. The exemption also drops away for anyone who employs another person to do the work or help with it, or who advertises in a way that might suggest to the public they’re a contractor.

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 bolted to the house needs a permit in the City of LA whatever its height, and so does a freestanding one more than 30 inches up, and needing a permit ends the exemption by itself. Guard and handrail replacement is in the same category, and so is anything reaching into joists, beams, ledgers, posts or stringers. On a rental with three or more units, a wood framed balcony, walkway or landing more than six feet above the ground falls under SB 721, and the inspection it requires has to come from a licensed architect, a civil or structural engineer, or a contractor holding an A, B or C-5 license. Concrete decks and anything lower than that sit outside it. Watch the running total too. Baseboard in one room plus a crown run plus a cabinet job passes $1,000 faster than people expect. When a job lands on the far side of any of this, we bring in a licensed contractor to do it.

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 photo of 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. Crown needs the ceiling height, and whether the ceiling is flat, coved or sloped. Count the cabinet doors and send 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.