If you are lucky enough to have a period home, then the internal features of it were doubtless a major attraction when you first bought it and so you want them to look their best. Features such as skirting boards, ceiling mouldings and architrave add character to a home as well as maintaining the style and the traditional feel of how the property was originally designed.
It is natural that you will want to keep these internal features, but items such as architrave can start to fade over the years, or can become damaged. Architrave provides an important function in concealing joints and gaps around your doors and windows to provide a neat finish, rather like a skirting board, so if they are not looking their best you will want to return them to their former glory. So the question is, do you restore your architrave or replace it?
Restoring architrave
One of the main reasons original architrave doesn’t look that good anymore is because layers and layers of paint have piled up over the years and the contours of the original profile have lost their definition. The architrave can also have become damaged by vacuum cleaners, the kids or pets.
You may want to restore your architrave because you are loyal to the original features of the house and want to retain the authenticity. Restoring your architrave is definitely a good job for the DIY enthusiast, because it can take a long time and you do need certain skills. You will need to be able to strip paint and sand the wood down, and then use filler to repair any damage. Sometimes these lengths of architrave may not have been touched in several years, so it is difficult to know what condition they will be in and indeed, whether they can be restored at all. Also, there is no guarantee that the architrave will look good once restored, or at least as good as it originally did.
Replacing architrave
If you choose to replace your architrave then this is a much quicker way of freshening up your interior design. You can replace all the lengths so you can guarantee all your architrave will look the same once you have finished, which you couldn’t if you were restoring them. And in addition to having a uniform appearance, new architrave will look brighter and have more of an impact in freshening up a room. It is also true that if you choose a good quality wood for your architrave, such as pine, sapele, tulipwood or oak, they will all take a coat of paint or varnish very well and will be strong and robust to last for many years.
Replacing your architrave with new sections from Period Mouldings means you can choose a design period from Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian or Contemporary. These are all handmade using traditional techniques and hence are faithful to the specific design period, so there is no loss of authenticity when replacing your original architrave, and if your existing architrave doesn’t match any of these design periods, Period Mouldings can take a sample and make a bespoke architrave design for you.
So we would always recommend to replace your architrave rather than restore it, because it is much quicker and easier, and the replacement architrave will look uniform and will brighten up your room while also maintaining the authentic ‘period’ feel that you are after. Contact Period Mouldings today and we can talk to you about the process of replacing your period architrave.