Shadowline skirting and square set architraves through a full apartment fixout, run to the builder's programme.

Agreed with the plasterer

Bead height was set once, level around every room, and agreed before the plasterer started rather than renegotiated wall by wall afterwards. A shadowline that steps up and down between rooms is the most obvious possible sign that nobody set it out.

The bead goes in before the skirting, not after, so the line is established by the plasterer and followed by us. Reversing that order means chasing a line that has already been painted.

Scribed, not mitred

Every internal corner scribed. A mitre opens as timber moves and a scribe closes, and across this much running metre that one difference is the whole job a year later.

It is slower on the day and invisible on handover, which is exactly why it gets skipped. It is also the reason a client calls back in the second summer about gaps in every corner of the apartment.

Joints on studs

Long walls were spliced with a mitred joint landing on a stud, so the joint tightens instead of gapping. A butt joint in the middle of a span has nothing behind it and will open.

Where walls ran out of line the skirting was scribed to the floor and the discrepancy taken out at the top, against the wall, where a shadowline absorbs it and nobody looks.

Left ready for paint

Holes punched and filled, joints sanded flush, and every run checked in raking light before we called it finished. Raking light shows what a work light hides, and it is what the painter and the client will both see eventually.

The whole fixout ran to the builder's programme, which meant ordering profiles before the site was ready for them and turning up with material already machined rather than waiting on a supplier mid job.

Similar work: full apartment and house fixouts, heritage profile matching, and custom mouldings machined to a drawing.