From pow to wow

Posted by: Paulette
When I my third son was three years old, I foolishly hung a window scarf around the back french doors. It looked really pretty until he thought it would be fun to play Tarzan hanging from them. Actually he was being George from George of the Jungle. Remember that movie?

 This was the result.

At first I thought that a little wood glue and some small nails would fix the problem. I put the rod with the piece of broken rim molding into the abyss garage. About a year went by, and we cleaned out the garage. Somehow the piece went missing. I think there's a monster in there that ate it.
So my next solution to the problem was to look for trim molding to match and create a patch. There is no such thing. How do I know that? Because I have a friend in the business of trimming out houses and he told me. That's how.
Then I saw my friend had done a clever thing in her kitchen with some rosettes. They look like this:

She had them at the corners of her trim molding. I thought this was a new solution to my problem. Saw off the bad part, pop in the rosettes on the ends and voila. It's fixed. Nope. I didn't envision things right. All that would do is take off the mitered corners. Not account for the broken piece.
On date night Dave and I went to Lowes and walked around trying to figure out what to do. The cost to replace the trim molding on the entire set of doors was going to be about $60. Not an option.
Then I got my genius idea.

Why not make the doors match all of the other arched doorways in our house by adding an arch?
I bought a small piece of wood (don't ask me what kind) and we brought it home. This is when things started to go right.
First I removed the piece of trim above the door with a flat head screwdriver.

I measured the space and subtracted the width of my board.
And then, using my miter box as a guide) marked where I wanted to cut and then cut a new mitered corner for the other side, cutting off the excess board. Then I nailed my two corners back up.
The next thing to do was to cut the arch into my board. To do this I measured the width of the trim molding and started the arc from there. I did all of my measuring and cutting on a piece of cardboard and used that as a template.

After marking were to cut, I hand sawed the board and then sanded the cut, and nailed it into place.

It's been caulked, but not painted yet. I want to add something to make it look carved before I paint. I thought that I could find some wood appliques large enough to fill the space. I guess I can but they're expensive, and I'm cheap thrifty. So I am working on sculpting something from polymer clay (Super Sculpey) to glue and nail up there. When I'm done, it should take it from pow! to WOW! Stay tuned. I might finish this by the end of the year, and I might not. Remember, I still have unfinished concrete floors in my living room. It's a lot like living in a warehouse. But at least it's not the abyss garage!