The Making of a Frieze Board

I got carried away on trim in the purple room as usual, and part of that was making frieze boards for above the doors. I started with a 5" recycled pine board (recycled from the external trim of the windows). Strangely enough, the Lowes didn't have MDF, which had been my planned base, but I improvised.
Next, I ripped some colonial base down to 3", returned it on both ends for the top cap (I didn't want to use crown moulding at the top to make a dust collector). Then I used a piece of be moulding on the top against the colonial cap to make it look like nice.

I used a piece of simple beaded mullion along the bottom the base, to provide a highlight there. Lastly, I put a piece of dentil trim on top of the mullion to spice it up a bit.

There wasn't enough room to get a full board over either door in the room, so the were both one-sided returns. Basically, I warpped the trim around one end (the right above), and flush cut the other to snug up against the wall. The fluted door trim was recycled from the room, it was in rough shape, but was able to plane and sand it down, repaint it and it came out great (IMHO). We were actually able to save a lot of the old trim in this room, so we bought relatively little new trim. We did a paneled kind of thing in this room, with vertical styles and a plate rail.

The baseboards got the same treatment as the fluted door trim, these were the baseboards that were in the room originally, just planed, primed and painted. You probably can't tell in the picture, but we used a semi-gloss for the walls and flat for the trim, which actually came out nice, despite being what you're supposed to do. The plate rail is about 3 1/2" wide, and there's a piece of cove underneath to smooth the transition to the top rail of the paneling. That cove was formerly the crown moulding in this room. Lastly, about 1/3 of the vertical styles are recycled 3" colonial base from the guest bathroom. I ripped off the top and re-used them here.

I'm really please how the trim worked out in here, things really tied together well. The vertical styles are pretty much lined up with the studs, so some of the outlets and switches ended up overlaping. So I ended up putting in box extendors (which are outrageously expensive considering it's a useless little piece of blue plastic), on, and building out the trim around it. Here's one around the outlet, worked out nice.

Oh, and in my bit of bragging, here's an end table I made! It's sycamore and finished with a couple coats of Danish oil (or as it's called around here, fancy pants oil).
Lastly, here's a cool secretary we found at an antique store near here. Julies grandmother appears to have the highboy version of the exact same piece of furniture which is pretty neat. The makers mark is missing from ours, so we'll never know for sure, but it's a dead ringer for some pictures of secretary's made by a place called Maddox Furniture. They were located in western NY (Jamestown), so that gits as well, it's nothing special of course, but neat nonetheless.
So long!