Making Jamb, Side, and Head Casings

Welcome back to our home remodel. I’m going to work on more trim in the kitchen again today. 

My goal is to fully wrap this cased opening on both sides. I still have to decide what I want to do about the part on top, because I have crown coming in, a casing coming in, and a jamb coming in. I don’t know what I want to do there, so I’m going to procrastinate and make some other parts. 

On the other side of the room, I have these two openings. This one will go into the dining room and the other one will go into the entryway. I want to get the band board and head casing made, which will go above these openings. I can’t install them yet because other things need to be installed first, but I can at least get them made and off my to-do list. 

Here are the molding profiles, and this is the standard head casing call out. The difference with these ones is that I have a band board coming in up top, so I’m omitting this cove mold detail, but they will still have the bead detail at the bottom

That detail is also the same here above these windows, so I can make this one as well. 

I’m starting with the band board, which is the easy part. It’s going to come out of a 10-inch piece. It’s supposed to be an inch thick, so I have been gluing two inches onto a five quarter by eight because I can’t get a five quarter by ten. In this case, I’m only going to see a little bit of that bottom edge, so I can use a one-by for this and fur it out from the wall a little bit. 

For the head casings, I have some leftover 1x6s, so I just have to rip out a half inch off to get them down to five. The head casings above the windows is 10 foot. 

I also have some rips from when I made baseboards which I can use for the bead mold that goes along the head casings. 

The next thing I can procrastinate with is the baseboards. There are a couple of odd things going on here. I have the baseboard outlet, just like in the sunroom, so I’m going to have a cutout for that. I have some scraps of baseboard that I can domino together to scab in that piece with the switch plate. The more weird thing is the air return. I have a plate that matches the one I have in the sunroom. I just have to figure out what kind of surround I want to have to mount this air return into. 

So I’m going to take all of this down to the shop and turn this baseboard assembly into a reality.

I left the left side on this surround, just to see what it could look like. It would look better, but I will probably end up removing it and bringing the air return all the way to the upright. I don’t think I could make it work like this because I can’t move the vent.

After getting all the baseboard pieces attached, this is what this is going to look like, it just needs to get painted so that it looks like one piece. 

Next I have to remove the extension jambs on the front kitchen windows. The countertop folks are coming out to measure soon, and the stone is going to wrap from the countertop up the wall a little bit, and then transition to a stone sill. So these extension jambs will be replaced with stone. 

I’m also making a lower profile bottom piece for the window screen assembly for the center window. I did the same thing for the fixed window in the sunroom because it just creates a nicer look. 

All right, I’m dong procrastinating and it’s time to tackle the cased openings. Here are the original plans. The way it was drawn, the crown is supposed to come across the top of the opening and show one inch of the backer board, so it matches the one inch show on the rest of the cabinetry. But we noticed when we were framing that we can’t actually drop this head height down this low, which is needed to make this detail work.  

Here is a little mock-up of what I’ve come up with. The top jamb is more forward and wider than the side jamb to create a stopping point for the beads. Then there is going to be a stop bead on one side because I don’t want the bead to come up into the crown. 

One detail that you can see when this is on the wall is that the bead gets really tight into the pieces it’s going into. So on all the casings where the bead goes into something, I’m going to make a little bit of a step on the casing that will push the bead away from the thing it’s up against to give me a gap to get a nice caulk joint. 

While we are talking about plans, I’m going to touch on the pantry for a second. The pantry has a fully cased opening, but the difference is that the casing for this door is an inch thick because of all the other trim details that run into it. 

I’m going to start with the plinth blocks that go at the bottom of all the cased doorways because that will be easiest. 

While those are in the clamps, I’m going to rip my jambs down to width. I’m leaving them at their current thickness because my rough openings are wide enough that I don’t really have to worry about the extra thickness making a difference in my final opening. 

Then I made the beads that go right to the edge. 

The next batch of beads are on the boards that run into something flat. With these ones, one of the beads will be raised up a bit to create a little bit of a flat area before the bead starts, which leaves a little bit of a shadow line between the bead and the thing it goes into. 

Here is my done pile, which all needs to get sanded. I’m also going to pre-attach my plinth unit so this all goes off to paint as one unit. 

I’m onto the casings for the great room now, and these ones will have the stop bead in them. The boards are going to be two separate widths and the bit’s going to be at two separate heights. The stop bead is going to stop about three and a quarter inch down from the bottom of the crown, so I’m going to roughly get them stopped somewhere and I can trim and make it more precise when I cut them down to final length. With these boards done, that takes care of this whole opening, and I can stop dreading it. 

Next is the top molding for some of the head casings. I had some of the bead molding from things I made before, so I only had to make one piece for this. 

I will be making the head casings as a full unit here in the shop and then get them painted, because it will make for an easier install. 

Everything has been painted, and now I can do some installing. I can get the entire cased opening into the great room installed now, as well as the baseboard by the pantry. 

Here is this section! I ran out of shoe mold, but other than that, this section is done. I actually do like the air return detail, I think it worked out pretty nicely. 

And this opening is cased now, and I’m glad to have that behind me. I also have a lot of the other trim already made, so when the time comes that I can install it, I don’t have to worry about making it. That’s going to be pretty nice!

Thank you as always for reading along, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the home renovation, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!