Life At Villa Boswell

What an innocuous little title for such drama. This staircase has more twists and turns than Peyton Place! I’ve missed lots of work on the house since the drywall, but rather than going in sequence, I thought I’d let you know that we declare March 9 National House-Done-Day.  Yeppers, we passed our final inspection and got our electric tag.  Hopefully, we will have our electricity turned on this week.

Wayyy early Monday morning, at 1 a.m. to be exact, we finished the last requirement of the house necessary from the County’s perspective:  the master stair railing.  This blog is a little about that pain-in-the-neck staircase.

Cost.

Some months back, when the stair looked like it does in this photo below, we got an estimate from someone to finish the stairs, which meant:

• covering treads with wood
• covering risers with wood
• putting on the railing

That’s it.  How much could this cost?  $13,000 was the estimate.

Treads and Risers. Part of the reason the cost of the treads/risers was so much is simply due to waste.  To fit the treads at the bottom of the stairs, you need to use a single sheet of high-quality lumber that will fit the entire tread.  We decided that we’d go with travertine, since we found a place called Turk Stone that sold us some beautiful travertine bullnose treads for less money than the wood we’d use.  You can see Chris here, getting ready to position the railing for us to put in the balusters.  The tread edges are all made of the bullnose travertine, and the risers and back-fill sections made from the travertine we got through Bedrosians, with a significant discount from our Direct Buy membership.  The photo above shows how similar the travertine on the stairs is to the floor…and I love it, but that’s another post.

Railing

Ok, hard part done, right? The railing should be easy.  Ha!  The photo below shows Chris clamping in the railing, getting ready for us to hang the balusters to the underside.  But before that happened, he actually had to create the railing.  This was more complicated than I ever could have imagined, and by the time we reached the point in the photo below, I was wondering if the $13K price wasn’t a good deal after all.  Here’s a quick run-down of what we had to do…

1. Design the stair and baluster combo, ordering both straight and bendable railing components from StairSupplies.com. We did this months back.
2. Get a PILE of clamps from our neighbor Dennis (the tool man) and Rob (our friend from Pine Cottage)
3. Steam each section of the railing that has to be bent for a few hours.  Now, how do you steam wood?  Why, you make sure you have a clean-freak wife with a steam cleaner, and then you use stove pipe and insulation to create a "steam chamber" and then you steam the crap out of the wood with afore-mentioned steam cleaner.
4. Take the freshly steamed wood out of the chamber, using gloves, and run like hell to the stairs, clamping the railing to the tread bottoms so that it exactly follows the treads.  Sorry, I don’t have a photo of this, but we did this all before the actual treads were finished.  You can see the railing pieces in the first photo.
5. Put all the pieces together.  Remember Humpty Dumpty?
6. Do it perfectly.  Why? Stair railings must be no closer than 1.5" from the wall (at the top). From the nose of each tread, the height can vary no more than 34" – 38".

We got there, but not without making a mistake.  That meant we had to order more stair railing and wait and wait for it to come and then fix it.  Lesson learned: order extra stuff just in case.  The photo below shows the piece that caused so much agony: the transition from the railing to the volute.  (Isn’t volute a great word?)  That’s the curvy piece on the end.  We initially made this transition too short. You can see the rough joins and all the dowling necessary to make the piece unified.  When it’s completely finished, you won’t see sharp angles, dowels or the myriad of holes… 

Good thing Chris used to restore fine pianos in a previous life. Each section was first glued carefully together by drilling multiple small holes on each piece, and filling with epoxy.  After the epoxy set, the piece was strong enough to support dowling, which is done for each join.  You can see below–apart from my goofy smiling guy–that there’s some steep pitches and angles.  They’ll all be softened out in the end.

The railing winds up to the top floor, where it can be no closer than 1.5" from the wall. Just re-positioning this railing for measuring and cutting was a royal pain, because it had to be exact, even in its temporary state.  When you have such a complex piece as this, one part can be correct while the rest of the railing would be off.  It took us one hour just to clamp that bugger in the right position.

That’s me around the bend, holding it in place while Chris clamped and re-clamped.

Once we got the railing clamped up high enough to allow us to insert the balusters into the holes we drilled (which involved very careful measuring and drilling at angles), we had to measure the exact distance for each baluster, thenlabel the correct baluster style (three styles) with measurements and step position.  Here they sit, all labeled and ready to be measured.  I measured the distance and marked it with tape for Chris to cut.

Finally, we got to insert them into the railing, where we fixed them via a screw which pinned the baluster via a pre-drilled hole.  At the bottom, you can see the balusters are all hanging, dangling like a bunch of earrings from the railing.   The next step would be to gradually, gradually lower the railing while positioning each baluster in the pre-drilled hole in the treads.  Some ballusters were clearly too long, so they had to be cut again.  When you’re doing this at about 10 p.m. the night before the inspection, little expected stuff like that gets to be a bit much….

Railing Complete

But, we did it!   The balusters are all in their slots, fixed with grout at the bottom and screwed in under the railing.  The main strength of the staircase comes from the anchoring at the top of the stairs and from the big post at the end, called a newell post.  That post is solid iron and anchored with bondo in a hole going down through the travertine into a part of the step made with solid laminated plywood stacked 7" thick and anchored to the floor.