Trim & Moulding near you

Most open joints are seasonal movement, not bad workmanship. Timber and fibreboard take up moisture in a humid summer and give it back in a dry winter, and a mitre cut in one condition will show a hairline in the other. The controls are acclimatising the material, scribing internal corners, gluing external mitres and caulking flexibly at the wall junction. A room that has been sealed up and air conditioned all summer, then opened in autumn, will move more than one that is ventilated normally.

Some movement is the building rather than the trim. Much of suburban Australia sits on reactive clay that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, so a house lifts and settles seasonally and the movement concentrates at openings. Trim that opens at the same corner every summer and closes every winter is following the ground, and repeatedly filling it is treating a symptom.

Water damage looks different and is permanent. Fibreboard skirting behind a leaking dishwasher, under a shower wall or against a wet laundry floor swells, loses its profile and never recovers, and the swelling usually appears before the leak is found. Treat a bulging skirting board as a moisture report, not a cosmetic problem, and find the source before replacing the trim.

Original skirtings and architraves in an older Australian house carry every coat the house has ever had, and the earliest of those may be lead based. LeadSmart NSW states that lead paint was used in most homes built in Australia before 1970 and notes that lead paint can be dangerous even before renovations start, for example when it chips off around windows and doors. Architraves and window sills are exactly those locations, because they are handled, knocked and rubbed constantly.

The guidance is not to strip everything. LeadSmart NSW advises that if the paint is in good condition, leave it alone or paint over it, and that wet sanding and wet scraping are the safest methods of preparing a surface for painting or removing old lead paint. A contractor who proposes dry sanding every architrave in a pre-1970 house is choosing the method that generates the most dust in the rooms people live in.

The controls LeadSmart NSW names are worth raising with a contractor before work starts, because they go beyond ordinary site practice: coveralls, and breathing protection approved to AS 1716 carrying a P1 or P2 filter rather than a paper dust mask. Clean-up is held to the same standard, with a vacuum of industrial or HEPA type kept out of ordinary household use, and the debris bagged in heavy-duty plastic for an approved part of the local waste facility. Trim also has a low-dust option that a wall does not: whole lengths can be prised off and replaced, so the old coating leaves the house intact rather than as airborne dust.

Repair makes sense when the trim is sound and the problem is local: an open mitre, a section damaged by furniture, a length pulled off during a floor replacement. Original profiles in older houses are worth keeping for the same reason original windows are, because a reproduction never quite matches the wear and the paint build of the rest of the room.

Replacement is the better answer when the damage is moisture related, when fixings have failed along a whole run, or when the existing trim is a profile that no longer matches anything else in the house. It is also the practical choice when new flooring changes the height relationship, since a skirting that has been cut to sit above an old carpet will not suit a new hard floor.

A third option is worth naming: leave the original trim and add to it. Many Australian houses have had a taller skirting fitted by running a new profile above the existing one, or an architrave widened with an added bead. It keeps the original in place, which matters in a house where the trim is part of the character, and it avoids disturbing old paint films.