This article will explain how to remove decorative mouldings such as skirting boards and architraves. This might be needed when you are decorating or just replacing the mouldings. Some tips on how to minimise the damage to walls are included.
Tools
- Sharp blade
- Hammer
- A bar for leverage with a thin edge such as a mouldings remover or a crowbar
STEP 1: SCORE AROUND THE BOARDS
The first thing you will need to do is to use a sharp blade to score the layers of paint around your moulding. This will give you a small gap in between the moulding and the wall to wedge your remover into. Make sure to score all the way around. Here, I am removing a picture rail and scoring along the rail’s top and bottom.
STEP 2: REMOVE THE MOULDING
Once you have scored around the moulding, you need to get your remover and start gently wedging it in between the moulding and the wall. You can use anything that is quite thin but strong such as a mouldings remover, strong scraper, screwdriver etc. Note that the wider the object, the easier it will be to remove the moulding.
At this point, I only had a flat head screwdriver available. Once it wedged in, I leveraged the moulding off the wall. If you find that your remover will not fit in the gap, use a hammer to gently knock it in until it’s in deep enough to get you a good leverage point to pry the moulding off.
TIPS FOR A TIDY REMOVAL
I had to remove all mouldings from the bedroom I was decorating, including the picture rails, skirting boards and door frames. This was the first time I’d done it and during the process, I learned a few things:
- The wider the tool you use, the more leverage it will give you. When removing especially tough mouldings such as nailed-on wide skirting boards, a larger tool will make the job much easier.
- The smaller the tool, the more damage will be done to the wall behind the moulding. As you can see above, the holes left in the wall are quite big because the nails took a lot of plaster with them. However, there are additional holes in the wall where I wedged the screwdriver. When I later on switched to using a mouldings remover, the damage was significantly less.
- Yanking the wood off will cause more damage than gently wriggling it off. I especially found this with the super wide skirting boards I removed. When I would yank them off hard, the plaster chunks the nails pulled off were bigger. However, I also found that I just wasn’t strong enough to wriggle some boards off – they had to be yanked off with force!
- When removing skirting boards, try to get the tool all the way to the floor and leverage against the floor NOT the wall. This will help significantly minimise the damage done to the wall as the tool will be wedged into the floor and will not push against the fragile plaster wall. Unfortunately for me, my skirting boards were too wide and nailed on too hard for me to be able to do this on most of them.
- If your mouldings are nailed on with the world’s biggest nails as mine were, you can’t avoid some damage no matter how hard you try! This is especially true for lath and plaster walls – big nails pull giant chunks of plaster off the lath. Be prepared to do a spot of filling or patch plastering afterwards.
THE RESULT
Here are some pictures of the damage left after I removed the mouldings. Luckily we were planning on patch plastering and then skimming the walls with joining compound anyway so for us it wasn’t that big of a deal. If you aren’t planning on doing much fixing to the walls, do remove a test piece somewhere in an inconspicuous area to gauge the damage. In some newer houses, the mouldings are either glued or put on with screws so removal will be really clean (if you can find the screws). In old houses (and unfortunately in some new ones too), they tended to use giant square nails that will damage the walls significantly no matter how hard you try. Doing a test area removal will help you decide if it’s worth the effort.
