A Staircase Balustrade
We moved into our home about 9 years ago. The house was built in ’67 and our ‘new’
home looked VERY dated. Old wall paper, gaudy plastic light switches, etc. Anyway, the foyer (the first place you see when you enter our home) had a skinny, black, wrought iron banister for the staircase. I don’t like what these look like mounted on cement steps outside the home much less inside my foyer. I’m a cabinetmaker and I’d like my home to be a well made, older structure …built with care and craftsmanship (something that we see less and less ‘these days’).
Although not a stair builder per say, I wanted a balustrade (that’s the handrail and all the vertical posts) to be rich and substantial …. and made of wood.
(For clarity, I’ll define some terms here. The major upright posts that sit at the bottom or top of the stairs and at any landings are called ‘newel posts’ and the smaller spindles that rise from the steps are called ‘balusters’. )
For months I thought of what I could fabricate and what it would make sense for me to buy considering my time and cost (and the fact that we don’t do any lathe work in my shop).
There is a huge flea market, half an hour north of us, that has a section of sellers that deal mainly with antique furniture, salvaged architectural details, etc. As luck would have it, a woman running one of the booths said she had three cardboard boxes in the back of her truck of parts to an old staircase railing salvaged during the demolition of a large, old estate. When I started to drag out the contents, I found a large, turned newel post, a few lengths of wide handrail and (what must have been) 35 ornate spindles. Everything except the handrails had been painted. The handrail was made of walnut whose patina was beautiful from being handled for many decades. I talked her down to a hundred bucks and took the cartons home. I stripped the big newel of all it’s paint and found it also made of a single piece (11” diameter /no seam) of solid walnut. That must have been some walnut tree cut down in the late 1800 / early 1900’s.
Among the hand rail, I had sections that turned left and right, some up and down and I also found that section where the hand rail ‘becomes’ the cap that sits on top of the large newel post at the bottom of the stairs.
I fabricated two more newel posts (not turned nor as detailed as the existing one) and installed them securely to the stair sides.
At the bottom of each baluster (where they rise from the steps) was a dovetail. This dovetail is made to be inserted (sideways) into the ends of the stair tread and an end cap is then nailed on to cover the join and end grain. I used the right sized dovetail router bit to match the dovetails and cut slots in my stair treads. After clamping everything into position on the stairs, I marked where and what angle to cut the railing and I drilled holes in the bottom of the handrail (the spindle’s tops were simply rounded /like a dowel) to correspond with their new positions along the stairs.
A day after the glue up, I leaned my weight into the side of the large newel at the bottom of the stairs and it didn’t budge more than 1/8th of an inch. This puppy should remain solid for decades. Except for the bottom newel post and handrail, we painted everything the same color as the risers …and my wife and I are much happier now with our foyer.
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Now that was uncalled for...
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