I never start a job, without having the transition moldings in hand, so I can cut them first to mark the floor and know where the flooring needs to go, to be perfect.

I prepped my last job, and we were waiting on the hickory transitions to come in, before I started. Yesterday I get to the job, and everything is there, to get busy. I get all my saws and cut area set up and get all the tools inside. Took about an hour.

Grab an endcap for the exterior door, and discover right before cutting it, it is for a ¾" floor. I have a ½" engineered floor. Also the color is pale in comparision to the hickory flooring. I go pull a "T" molding from the box, and it is for the ½" flooring and matches perfect.

I pull all the moldings out of the box, and all the endcaps are for ¾, and much paler in color. The other 2 sticks of "T" molding are so bowed, I don't know how they got them in the box. One being twisted & warped also.

I could have ripped the endcaps to make them work, but the pale color and if he wanted me to rip them, I left up to the client to make the call. I wasn't even going to try and use the bowed "T"s

So now we are trying to track down the correct and straight moldings


I have 1200 sq.ft. of flooring begging me to caress it, and we are waiting on moldings.



Don't you just hate it when that happens

I know exactly what you mean! And for what they charge for those moldings, you would think they would take better care in selecting and shipping but NOOOOO, those are usually the very things that are screwed up. That's why whenever possible, I make my own.

I have often ripped a T moulding down the middle to use at the exterior doors. You have one good T, you can make a lot of exterior door transitions out of it, and use the dimensions to set up for the shipment of the hopefully straight stuff. When in doubt, get T moulding. You can make almost everything from it.

Let's see: you could make reducers, baby threshholds, end caps, rip in half and stand up for weird baseshoe, but no quarter rounds, true baseshoe, baseboards or stair nosings, all the real expensive stuff.