Bullnose Trim for Dummy Carpenters

Bullnose trim on stair treads

One of our favorite sayings here at the Antisocial Network goes something like, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought an idiot than to open it and erase all doubt,"  an aphorism variously attributed to Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln. Whoever said it, we take that adage seriously: you may have noticed that we rarely, if ever, expose freelancing bull-tossers in areas like the law or beauty; mainly because we have no one on staff with sufficient expertise. Lack of expertise, however, never seemed to stop the greedy freelancers at sites like eHow.com and HubPages.com, where they gleefully exposed their stupidity for all to see. Take, for instance, eHow's Amanda Fetherlin seen here pretending knowledge in a post called "How to Cut Bullnose Trim for Stairs"¹ at HomeSteady.com.

You know Amanda's dissembling from the get-go, since she opens her introduction with some typical Demand Media utter bull:

"The stairs inside your house have rounded front trim called bullnose trim. This trim protects your toes from getting cracked on the sharp corners where the tread meets the riser."

Well, no, Amanda, the corner "where the tread meets the riser" is underneath the thread in most staircases, and probably wouldn't "crack" your toes. What she wanted to say (but didn't because she knows nothing about stairs) is that the tread overhangs the riser. But that's not the worst of her sins, no indeed. Fetherlin goes on to opine,

"Without this important piece of stair covering, you would need to replace the treads and risers quite often. You have to cut the trim to the exact width of the tread to guarantee a tight fit."

Utter bull, people, especially the rubbish about bullnose being a "stair covering" and replacing the risers... But then she starts with the "instructions," and it gets utterly silly... Amanda instructs us to "Measure the width of the tread for the first step using a tape measure." Bad advice, Amanda: tape measures are notoriously bad for measuring interior dimensions. This is one case where you're likely to end up with "measure twice, cut three times"! She also instructs her readers to "Set the trim against the fence of the miter saw. Hold the miter saw with your dominant hand and the trim with the other."

Either Fetherlin's never used a (power) miter saw or she writes instructions poorly: "Hold the miter saw with your dominant hand"? Sheesh... and she's never heard of clamps?  One thing we found quite amusing was that she used an image of a closed stairway for her article, but her instructions would only work on an open stairway. Lack much knowledge, Amanda?

She also doesn't address the possibility of cutting a bullnose on the lip of the stair tread with a bullnose router bit (which, though she probably doesn't know it, would have to be performed before the tread was installed). Nope, no mention at all...

No, like Fetherlin's other woodworking articles (and we've previously seen her make a complete mess out of three carpentry projects on two sites under two different names), this one bespeaks a total lack of experience and expertise. That's a perfect reason to give Amanda / A. L. / Amy Fetherlin yet another Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_12201961_cut-bullnose-trim-stairs.html

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DDIY - STAIRS