How do you remove skirting boards without damaging the wall?

We score the paint line first so nothing peels, then refit the skirting on top of the new floor.

The short answer

We are going to take some skirting off now. We are in a relatively new build, so the skirting is significantly newer than if you are in a tenement, for example.

Firstly, we score the top of the skirting with a Stanley knife so that we do not peel any of the paintwork off. That should give us a nice clean cut for when we take the skirting off.

We will be putting the skirting back on, on top of the new flooring. So the flooring that we are using is 20 mil thick, so the skirting will then come up 20 mil. So it will hide any of the expansion gap that we do make.

Once the flooring goes down, the new line of the skirting, it will be a little bit higher. And then we caulk that. A nice clean line across there, and that is a finished product.

Related questions

• What is beading, and when do we use it?
• Why do you scrape the wall before putting the skirtings back?
• Why do you undercut doorways and remove skirting boards?

See our flooring installation service or get an estimate.

We install floors across Edinburgh, East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian.