Thursday, January 28, 2010

Wood Cold Air Return Project Complete

The wood cold air return and new base board are installed. We are very pleased with how it looks. Of course it will look much better when the base shoe is installed and the floor is refinished in a rich dark stain. The wall color has yet to be determined but we do know the base board will be painted white. The wood outlet cover will be painted to match the wall.Installation was pretty straight forward. We used long wood screws to attach the base board to the wall. Because of the configuration, we were able to hide the screws behind the grill. The grill was then attached to the base board with four 1 and 1/4 inch wood screws. We counter sunk the wood screws so that we could hide the screws behind wood caps. We glued the caps in placed when we used these same wood caps on B & G's deck. In our application, we need the option to remove the caps to gain access to the screws if we ever need to remove the grill. I don't believe the caps will come out because I needed to use a hammer to install them.The wood outlet cover required a little modification. When I removed it from the package I found out that the back was reinforced with a steel plate. I used a sharp knife to help release the glue (rubber cement) that held the metal plate to the wood cover. R used a pneumatic grinder with a cut off wheel meant for cutting metal, to cut off the excess metal plate. While R was grinding I used the chop saw to trim the wood cover to the correct size.
Here is the wood outlet cover installed. I see I have some sanding and patching to do around the electrical outlet. This is the view as you come into the foyer from the vestibule entrance.
The wood grill looks 100% better than the ugly bent metal cold air return. I still need to fill some holes with wood putty. The base board just around the corner is missing a chunk the size of a half dollar which I will probably fill with epoxy.Here is a side by side comparison. I vote for the wood cold air return. The metal grill has been relegated to the scrap metal pile.

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