Laminate molding (trim) looks great, but if it’s stuck to your baseboards and plinths with proper wood glue, it’ll be a nightmare to remove. It might damage your baseboards and plinths quite a lot.
Thankfully, I have been through this recently and I learned a few tips and tricks that I wanted to share with you. This will make the process easier, and hopefully reduce the damage that removing the molding will cause.
The individual sections/timestamps of this video are:
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:43 Things To Consider First
- 1:26 Removing From Baseboards
- 2:10 Removing From Plinths
- 2:40 Removing Glue + Wood Residue
- 3:17 Wrapping Up
Video Transcript
Hello, I’m Tristan. I recently decided to remove all my laminate, which was a bit bittersweet since I laid it all myself 5 years ago. But it was time to change it. So I set to work on this, which firstly involved removing the laminate molding trim from the skirting boards (or “baseboards” as you Americans call it). Unfortunately this laminate molding doesn’t always come off easily – it’s nearly always glued into place, either with self-adhesive strips or with proper wood glue.
Thankfully I found a magic way of removing the molding: scouring pads. Don’t worry, I didn’t hit my head with a hammer while removing my laminate – all will be revealed in this video!
When you’re wanting to remove laminate molding, there’s two main things to consider: firstly, is it stuck down with self-adhesive strips or real wood glue? And is it stuck to painted baseboards, directly onto wood, or onto pre-primed plinths?
Removing self-adhesive molding from painted baseboards will be much easier than removing molding stuck to wooden baseboards with proper wood glue, for example, because the bond won’t be as strong in the first case. But either way, you should only need a few basic tools: a utility knife, putty knife and mallet or hammer. Oh yeah, don’t forget my magic tool, too.
For painted baseboards, you should be able to just put a putty knife behind the laminate molding and hit downwards with a mallet. The key is to get behind the molding. Once you have done this, you can angle the putty knife a bit and keep hitting sidewards. This will slowly but surely break the bond of the self-adhesive or wood glue, and allow the molding to come off. If you notice that it’s really difficult to do this, though, or your baseboards are getting overly damaged, you should run a utility knife alongside the edge first.
It’s unfortunately unlikely that you’ll be able to remove the molding without causing some damage to the baseboard or plinths, but hopefully it’s nothing that a bit of spackling paste and paint can’t fix.
If you have stuck laminate molding onto plinths, the process is similar, but it might be a harder process because plinths are often pre-primed, and a lot of this pre-primed layer can come off when removing the molding. As a result, I took a lot more time removing the molding here. I firstly used a utility knife to cut downwards, breaking some of the bond between the molding and plinth. I then used a putty knife to further break this bond, and ultimately help remove the molding.
Once the bulk of this molding was off, I was left with an annoying residue – a mix of wood fiber and glue. I originally tried removing this by force (i.e. using a putty knife), but my magical friend here was actually the biggest help. I worked some water into the residue, and left it for 5 minutes. I was then able to scrape off most of the residue fairly easily.
You might need to re-do this step a few times, especially if there’s lots of residue left, but overall it worked really well. I would imagine that this would work really well if your molding is stuck onto wooden (not painted) baseboards, too.
And that just about wraps up today’s video. Basically, the process for removing laminate molding can be a bit frustrating – but some patience and a few simple tools is all that you’ll need. I hope you liked this video. If you did, please click the thumbs up button. Please also subscribe to my channel, and click the bell icon – which will notify you when I release a new video. Thank you!