One of the main purposes of putting skirting boards in a room is to give it a neat and finished look. However, this can become a real challenge when it comes to corners. Corners are where you need your skirting boards cut just right. If you fail to do so, you would not be able to achieve the neat and finished look that you want for your room.

How does anyone cut the perfect corners on a skirting board? Before you learn how to cut corners on your boards, you have to understand that there are two kinds of corners that you ought to pay attention to when cutting your baseboards. One is called the external corner while the other is the internal corner. The external corner is the one you encounter at doorways or when the room opens to another room. The internal corner literally refers to a corner of the room. These two types of corners are cut differently from each other.

Cutting External Corners

The process of cutting external corners is called the mitre cut. Assuming that the room corners at a perfect 90-degree angle, you have to divide this angle into two to get the angle of the mitre cut. Thus, for a corner that has a 90-degree angle, the mitre cut is 45 degrees.

There are many ways of getting the mitre cut, but one of the simpler ones is get a gauging board. The gauging board will determine the exact angle of the mitre cut. What you do with the gauging board is to hold it against the intersecting walls one at a time, drawing lines parallel to these walls with a pencil on the floor. Afterwards, you sketch a line from the corner of the wall to the point where the two parallel lines intersect each other. This becomes the mitre angle.

Once you have figured out what the mitre angle is, you then must transfer it to the skirting boards. To do this, you copy the mitre angle on the gauging board and then use the gauging board to draw the mitre angle on the skirting boards themselves. And then you cut the boards with a saw.

Cutting Internal Corners

Cutting internal corners on skirting boards is a lot easier than getting the mitre cut. The trick to make the internal corners look a lot neater is to make one board overlap the other. This is made possible by scribing the board.

In scribing the board, all you need to do is to cut a part of the board and use it as a pattern to draw its profile ? its moulding ? on the other board with a pencil. Afterwards, you cut the outline created by the moulding with a coping saw.

How the skirting boards are cut at the corners lends to the neat and clean look that is so desired on these boards. The process of cutting skirting boards is not a complicated process, and they certainly can be done with patience and effort.