Hollow Skirting board

[Gil]

I have a room with unsightly central heating pipes attached to the plain skirting board. Rather than go through the pain of detaching and re-routing them, and, inevitably, patching up the damaged skirting, or building a box round them with a new skirting board as the vertical surface, I'd thought to use hollow skirting board, and contain both pipes and the old skirting in it. I'd need about 1.75 cm clearance, I guess, and I don't care if it's wood or plastic.

Does anyone know where I can get skirting like this? I had some plastic skirting in a house in Sweden once that you could open to thread cables etc through, but a scan of the web has failed to reveal any UK stockists.

TIA

Gil

[Jerry Built]

I should think you'll have to make it up. I think that this sort of thing looks rather odd, though. I take it you mean that you'd need 17.5mm clearance for the pipework off the face of the skirting?

J.B.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Gil wrote on Tuesday (02/03/2004) :

Electrical wholesalers should stock this sort of thing, ask for skirting trunking.

[Harry Ziman]

[N. Thornton]

You can buy it made for electrical work, but its not cheap. I'd at least consider making your own.

Wood can be routed or (better) dado sawed, or wood skirting can be made from 3 strips of thin wood glued together to make the required shape. Thats flat or shallow moulded front, profile top, and rectangular bottom strip.

Sheet metal can be bent to profile using a home made sheet metal bender, which is a pretty simple piece of kit. When I wanted sheet steel profile I made a bender in 2 or 3 hours out of scrap wood and some nice heavy hinges.

One advantage with steel is you can car spray paint it, and it wont need repainting for another 50 years or so.

Regards, NT

[Gil]

Regards.

Gil

[James Hart]

One option my BIL looked at to hide what would have been about 5 cables was to bring the skirting board forward half an inch by putting battens top and middle and running the cables in the void between the skirting and the wall. It would have been done on 3 walls so wouldn't have looked too strange.