The plinths

It seems that every day I am looking up new words. Today the word is "plinth". Turns out, I have many plinths in my house and it is a feature that we will mimic throughout the new construction. The plinth is the square block of wood positioned at the base of the door frame which should be thicker, wider and bigger than any other frame piece. Ours look like this.

The size of this plinth is deceptive. It appears to be in line with the other fame elements, but in fact, it is larger and thicker. Only 1/8th inch, but many of our measures didn't take this into account. There are plinths at every door way and opening, so the 1/8th inches are starting to add up.

We salvaged 8 plinth blocks from the original house, but now we are recreating the remaining 25 from scratch. They have two pieces, one that closely resembles the "base board curl" as I call it, and the other that is just a rectangular block. How hard could this be?  We have plenty of baseboards, thanks to our contractor who always over orders these specialty items. (He is way too familiar with the 'not enough curls' problem). He will "rip" the curls away from the baseboards to use on the plinths. If you are not familiar with "ripping", it just means a length-wise cut through a long board. Making a long thin piece.

Salvaged plinth on left, small scale plinth on right.

Full baseboard on left, ripped "curl" on right.

To complicate things a bit, we have two sizes of framing we are using. 5-inch is the original size and used throughout the original house. 3-inch is the size we are using when the 5-inch won't fit. 

Narrow spot between laundry room and bedroom will not be wide enough for the 5-inch plinths.

The original builders avoided small wall spaces like this.  Every door and window in the original house has plenty of room for at least a 5-inch wood molding surround. I am not sure if it is our modern building genius or just our desire to maximize access to small spaces that results in over 7 doorway locations that are too small for the 5-inch moldings.