Stair railing complete!

The stair case is now 99% complete. It still needs new light fixtures at the base and top of the stairs, a piece of trim where the stair case meets the plaster, and some general sanding/touching up. But for now it's pretty good we think. We have a house guest coming on Friday and need to get the house in shape so this wasn't a minute too soon!

Here's what it looked like before:

Here it is now:

Keep in mind that *none* of this is original to the house. The newels are cedar 4x4s clad with oak/oak trim, the railing is from central fairbank lumber (that was a gong-show and a half...), and the balusters were ripped out of a 1x8 of select pine. This meant that the balusters are rectangular and not square which we think gives the stair case a bit more of a craftsman-type feel.

The prettiest thing in our house right now...

...is this bit of railing we installed yesterday. Once we had all the pieces cut, painted and stained assembling the railing only took about 15-20 minutes. It was pretty sweet. Let's hope the main railing goes as smoothly.

Work on the upstairs railing

We're now getting close to being able to install the horizontal railing at the top of the stairs. We trimmed out the full newel and have started to stain it. We're also prepainting and staining the balusters, railing and baseplate to save us the pain of trying to paint/stain without making a mess when it is all installed.

Think we used enough clamps?

To make it so we could paint all sides of the balusters at once we rigged up this line.

Yet another stairs update...

Custom woodwork/stairs takes a lot of time, but we're really starting to see the pay off. We trimmed out the half newel and started staining it (it's a 2x4 with oak cladding). This is just after the first coat of stain, but it seems like it will look quite good.


We also finally got all the stairs stained! No more skipping other stairs, we can go up and down like normal people again. *woo*