Sawdust on the Floor

Hooray, it’s finally time to get to work on the newel post and staircase railing.  In case you haven’t been following this post, several months ago my Grandson slid down the old railing, rendering it very loose and in need of an overhaul. We decided rather than to repair the railing and Newel post, we would upgrade it.  That led to a complete rebuild of the stair case, and the installation of hardwood flooring in the upstairs hall.  And those things needed to be done before I attacked the railing and newel post.

Even though the oldest grandson promises to never try sliding down the railing again, he does have a younger brother, and he is easily lead astray by his older brother.  That being said, I knew that I had to find a better, stronger way the make the railing and newel post. Unless I want to be doing this again in a couple of years.  I love woodworking, but not doing the same thing over and over again. 

I figured that a good place to start on a new design was to analyze what went wrong with the first wooden newel post and railing, other than my grandson’s ride. Or maybe a better way to say it, I wanted to figure out why the rail and newel post became loose.  After some consideration, I realized that the method I had used to connect the original newel post to the house and eventually to the railing was the problem.  To connect the newel post to staircase, I inserted two 3/8” by 8” long lag bolts through the bottom end of the newel post into the rough framing of the stairway. That sounded like a good idea at the time, but in reality it was a bad idea. Read more…

In the last couple of postings I talked about redoing our upstairs hardwood flooring, by removing the carpeting and replacing it with hardwood flooring. The work in the hallway paved the way for the next step in our unexpected and every growing, remodeling job.  Remember we hadn’t planned on doing any of this work.  But thanks to an over energetic grandson, we found ourselves with a badly loosened railing and newel post. That lead to a decision to replace and upgrade the newel post and railing, which lead to the decision to replace the stair treads and risers, which lead to replacing the floor in the hall way upstairs.

So with the flooring done upstairs, it was time to tackle replacing the treads and risers of the stairs. I didn’t want to take the entire stairway out, that was much more work then I was willing to do.  So I devised a way to just replace the risers and treads.  I started out by using a reciprocating saw equipped with a blade designed for destruction to cut out the bottom two risers and treads.  I limited the work to two steps at a time, in case I ran into problems that would preclude me from finishing the project in one day. I have learned from past projects to always keep in mind the idea that something weird or unexpected may happen. While it would be inconvenient, we still could get up and down the stairs if we really had to.

After cutting out the first tread, I found that I had miscalculated.  Man I hate when that happens…….. Read more…