Stair Edging and Finishing

As I mentioned a couple posts back, Sarah took on the project of adding a hardwood edging to the stairs that go from the second floor to the attic as well as the attic hallway that overlooks the stairwell. Carpeting will cover the remainder. The first step was to add a piece of veneer plywood to each step riser using glue and a stapler, next cover the holes with Drydex (spackle) and prime the wood. I mixed up some regular drywall mud and filled in the corners where the risers meet the drywall sides of the stairs. I took the opportunity to patch some dings and dents, as well as close up the too-big vent opening in Emily’s ceiling. Some additional Drydex and sanding got most of these corners looking presentable, and paint will round it out.

Next was cutting mitered bullnose pieces to cover the tread edge. The rest of this L-shaped piece was filled with hardwood flooring scraps, which he fortunately have plenty of. Sarah cut all the pieces and glued and brad-nailed them all in place, with me assisting on a couple complex bits where they intersected the newel posts.

Sarah and Emily went around and spread wood fill into all the cracks. I had picked up red oak wood fill since it’s red oak flooring, but I’m a bit disappointed in the end result, because it’s much redder than the wood itself and stands out, the exact opposite of what you want wood fill to do. I would go with the natural color wood fill if we had a do-over.

After that, we got to sanding. We got some new power tools for Christmas, among them a cordless random orbit sander which got a lot of use in this process. A lot of edges needed more manual assistance from sanding blocks and folded pieces of sandpaper, but after many many hours, it was looking better.

I picked up TotalBoat Halcyon Clear marine grade polyurethane for the newels, railings, and edges, since we know they’ll need to handle a lot of abuse. After yet more sanding, we started brushing on the varnish. This… didn’t go as well. At a lot of the joints in the newels we started getting black drips. We’d wipe them off but then come back in a few minutes to find more, in some cases hardening in the varnish. This led to more sanding, more varnishing, and eventually we got most sections to look decent.

We spent a lot of time cleaning these up, and from the research I’ve done it’s most likely caused by a reaction with the tannic acid in the oak, but we can’t be sure. I don’t think it was a problem with the varnish, since no one else seems to have reported it and it’s very highly rated, but there are some other folks having general issues with oak finishing.