Built-Ins & Millwork Refinishing / Room Millwork
Room millwork refinishing in St. Louis.
Baseboards. Crown molding. Wainscoting. Chair rail. Window trim. Mantels. The finish that makes a room look finished.
The full scope of room millwork.
Room millwork is everything attached to the walls and ceilings that isn’t a door or a window — and in St. Louis’s pre-war homes, there’s a lot of it:
- Baseboards —
- often 6–8" tall in older homes, with ogee or beaded profiles
- Crown molding —
- the transition between wall and ceiling, often deep and multi-layered
- Wainscoting —
- applied panel or board-and-batten cladding on the lower portion of walls
- Chair rail —
- the horizontal molding that traditionally protected walls from chair backs
- Picture rail —
- the upper molding used for hanging art without damaging plaster walls
- Window trim and aprons —
- the casings, stools, and aprons framing each window
- Door casings —
- the trim surrounding each door opening
- Fireplace surrounds and overmantels —
- the full surround assembly including mantel shelf, pilasters, and frieze
Most older St. Louis homes have several of these elements. When they’re all in good condition and consistently finished, a room reads as complete. When any of them are worn, painted over, or mismatched, the whole room feels unfinished.
Visual coherence across a room.
Millwork refinishing is often about restoring the visual system of a room — bringing all the wood elements back to the same tone and finish level. This is especially important in formal rooms (dining rooms, living rooms, parlors) where the millwork was originally designed as part of the room’s aesthetic vocabulary.
We stain and finish room millwork to a consistent standard, whether we’re addressing a single element or a full room. When work is done in phases — mantel first, wainscoting later — we document the stain formula so the next phase matches.
Seasonal timing.
Room millwork refinishing is particularly popular for holiday season prep (October–November) in dining rooms and living rooms, and for spring refresh in rooms that face high-traffic use. Interior work runs year-round; there’s no seasonal constraint on millwork projects.
EPA Certified for pre-1978 millwork.
Room millwork in pre-1978 homes has lead paint. Working in living spaces — dining rooms, bedrooms, living rooms — makes proper containment and HEPA filtration especially important. Sue Wheeler is an EPA Certified Lead Removal. Every pre-1978 millwork project includes proper containment and documented cleanup.