Hello everyone, 

So I'm starting to work on this staircase and before I start cutting my skirt board I want to figure out how I am going to trim this spot where the skirt meets the baseboard. 

The designer calls for the top of the skirt to be 2" from the nosing. Unfortunately, the small return wall does not come far enough past the top of the stair framing to allow me to die the skirt into the base at the same height. 

I could only come up with three ways I could join the two moldings but I'm not sure what would look best. All have some sort of weird detail I'm not terribly fond of. Also, please excuse my rudimentary drawings. 

In slide 2: I'm worried that the horizontal join between the skirt and the base would look bad. 

In slide 3: I think being able to see the corner of the drywall next to the back of the baseboard will look strange. 

In slide 4: I'm not sure how it would look to see a bit of baseboard sticking out past the wall while coming up the stairs. This option also carries the same concern as the second option. 

A potentially important detail is that the material is prefinished knotty alder so I am somewhat limited with what I can do as far as cut ends. I was planning on cutting returns on any exposed cut ends that I could. 

I'm pretty new to this kind of thing so I'm looking for different ideas and advice. 

Thank you in advance!

How would you trim this?