Many hugs and thank you's to those who continue to check back to see if we have our life together yet.
Recently I took on a new job, which means back to full-time status. Ugh. It also means our "extra" time is that much more valuable, therefore, the project wagon has not been as full lately.
I am here to share a couple fun updates though. For any of you homeowners out there living in a "barely meeting code" home, like us, you sometimes wonder why it took you so long to fix/secure/replace something pretty sketchy. Take our stair railing for example. That thing wiggled and wobbled more than... oh... I'll just stop there. I was convinced replacing the stair rail would be an easy fix. For those of you who have replaced a newel post and railing, you probably understand how cray-cray my thoughts were.
Rewinding a bit, a few weeks ago we went to Gold Rush with some friends. I had a 'Shane Approved' list to go off of, and an old newel post was listed in my top three. I was expecting to find, oh, I dunno, like a dozen of these suckers? Apparently, they are hard to come by. You know that feeling you get when you spot a $10.00 bill on the ground? Exact same feeling I had when I saw the only newel post in all of Gold Rush staring right back at me. It was dirty and beautiful. The dude was charging $45.00 FIRM. He said he ripped it out of an old farm house in one of the Dakotas. Price checking new newel posts at home improvement stores, they were more expensive, and not nearly as much girth.
Sold.
It took a few weeks, but we finally started making headway on the railing. Simple enough to rip out the old railing, and replace it with the new, right? Wrong. What I failed to realize is the newel post is actually put in before the flooring, to ensure stability. Not sure what went wrong hurr... but stability was not it's strong suit.
Plan B.
We ripped out the old railing system, trying to preserve the base stair thread (with the already drilled peg holes). The stair thread got a good sanding, and a fresh coat of stain. Next, we sawed the old newel post off, right at the base. Instead of removing the old newel post, it was thin enough for us to create a slip with the new (old) newel post. We carved out a square at the bottom of the new (old) newel post, and slipped it over the old craptastic one, and secured it using our nail gun. Next, we primed and painted our new stair spindles Silky White by Behr. I ended up picking up a low-profile stair handrail, and cut my own piece of wood to use as the rosette, staining it the same color as the thread base. Why low profile? I really wanted the newel post from Gold Rush to be the focal point.
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| Chiseling a hole to use as a slip. |
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| Providing extra security for the newel post |
Yesterday evening we finally got around to securing the spindles to the stair handrail and to the stair thread. We gave it a little shake and it hardly moved. Vast improvement from what was there before. I would trust that a whale could probably lean on it.... hmm. Maybe.
For this project, we used a lot of Poplar wood. I like the variation of the wood, and it tends to be a bit more forgiving as opposed to hardwood (ha) like oak.
And just for comparison sake, here is a before and after shot--
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| Now |
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| 2006 |
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| Pre-now 2015 |
My apologies. I seemed to have disliked the old set-up enough for me to avoid capturing photos of it... but you get the gist of it. Now to put our home back together again... Tootles.
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