Cleaning Out Gaps in Dental Molding Good Questions

Q: HELP! My boyfriend and I recently purchased a condo in JP, and an "eh, I can live with it" aspect of the place has become a major pet peeve for my boyfriend. A previous owner hastily painted over the dentil molding, filling in the gaps with paint. As you can see, some of the gaps were either carved out after painting, or somehow stopped up beforehand...

I would love to be able to find out if there's a good way to carve out these gaps. The boyfriend let me have my sky blue kitchen, now I want him to have gorgeous molding. Thank you! Sent by Cynthia

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Comments (8)

Well, for the easiest, I'd probably see if you can find a replacement at Home Hardware or something. You may be able to pry off the old one, put on the new one, and paint.

Otherwise, the way my partner does it is to go at it very carefully with an xacto knife, which is slow and arduous and really kind of sucks. It might be easiest, too, to pry it off and do that on a dining room table.

Paint stripper. Gel form. Done.

Also this kind of molding is "dentil." The adjective is "dentiled." ;-)

Hi everybody, question asker here!

Anaximamder - Thanks for the suggestions, but we'd really like to avoid removing or replacing the molding, as it's the original 100 year old molding. Using an Xacto knife is more along the lines of what I was thinking. Did your partner score out the gap and then chip or pry with a chisel? Any issues with paint chipping where you don't want it to?

TrevorHughes, Your comment has me intrigued. I don't know what gel form is and can't really find any info online. Can you give me some more details? Have you employed this method before?

JoanneM - Good to know, thanks!

Don't use paint stripper!! A heat gun will lift the paint off (mostly) without marring the wood underneath. Then use an artist palette knife to get into the detailed areas. I'm doing this right now - it is SO worth it!

Really, paint stripper doesn't work as well, check out my flickr photos:http://www.flickr.com/photos/81215304@N00/page34/ Getting sandpaper into the detailed areas where the stripper goes (and stays) is tough.

You may end up needing to strip the entire molding(s).

I'm thinking that you are going to have to remove all of the paint and repaint it neatly so that you get a clean uniform look. The "gel" the previous poster may be referring to is something like SOY-Gel paint remover.

A lady I once knew had an eighteenth century mantle with this kind of detailing. She used her husband's dental tools to get out all the old paint.

Heat gun, or 3m safe stripper, and if you want to go the dental tool route i've heard you can find them fairly often at swapmeets.