Stair Balusters

With the edging installed and the railings varnished, we moved on to balusters. I bought three different kinds of wrought iron balusters to make up a pattern: plain straight, a swirling pattern intended to tie with the front door that we called “squiggles”, and “baskets” where several pieces wrap around to make a ball. Originally I was planning to put “knuckles” for these, little diamond-shaped bits along the straight length, but Sarah liked the baskets and they were cheaper than the knuckles, which made it an easy call. I worked out a pattern and approximate quantities to order, along with “shoes” (the little piece that goes at the bottom), epoxy, and an epoxy gun.

The installation process was to first map out where the pieces would go, such that they was never more than a four-inch gap (per-code) and yet they didn’t land on the bullnose part of the treads. This probably wouldn’t have been that hard with all straight and basket pieces, but the addition of the wider squiggles meant I had to adjust spacing. I wound up having to be flexible to get this to work, with each run of steps having slightly different spacing.

Dean came over to help with this project, bringing his metal cut off saw (of course he has one of those) which made the process go much faster than if we had just used an angle grinder. We started with the horizontal run along the basement stair opening (the stairs that don’t exist yet). All of the horizontal sections were much easier to work out spacing, since there’s no bullnoses to work around, but it was my first one so it still took me a while. I put a piece of masking tape down, worked out the spaces, and then drilled holes for each one. I used my laser level to determine where the top should go and drilled those too. Drilling these holes took forever, and I wound up getting a new spade bit for the rest of the project, which was dramatically faster.

The other reason the horizontal sections were easier is because all of the balusters were the same height. Dean was able to cut them in bulk and get the ends ground smooth while I got the holes drilled and then I started putting them in with epoxy. The epoxy dispenser worked pretty well, and there was a decent amount of work time. We taped all of the shoes up before we put the balusters in so that we wouldn’t forget them and they’d be out of the way until the epoxy cured. You can’t come back and put the shoe on later if you epoxy the baluster in without it, so this was important.

We worked our way up the first flight, which got the two longest stretches of railing complete that day, but that was as far as we made it. Dean was nice enough to come back not once, but twice this week to help finish the project. I needed to get all of the holes drilled in the edging going up to the attic and in the attic hallway before the carpeting installation so we didn’t get sawdust in our new carpeting, so I got those sections mapped and drilled in advance. The first evening we finished all of the horizontal sections, getting into a good rhythm. The second evening Dean was joined by both his dad and Dan, and the four of us were able to get through the three remaining sections of stairs, cutting, grinding, taping, and epoxying.

The last run we did we encountered a new problem. The balusters are 44″ tall since the railings are 42″ high but they need to pocket in. Somehow, on several of the steps leading up to the attic from the landing, because the baluster aligned with the back edge of the step where the baluster is longest, we needed balusters taller than that. To solve this problem, we added little stubs to the bottom of the balusters where it will be covered up by the shoe anyway.

The kids went around and removed all of the blue masking tape, and then Dan came back on Saturday and used an allen wrench to tighten all of the many, many little baluster shoes in place.