Step by step...

Hello all. We left off our stairway project with the new treads and risers installed. In this and the next few posts we'll finish the job.

Two places that needed flooring were the top of the stairs and the small landing after the second step. We'll cover the former here. One thing we'd done months ago was to install a piece of 1/4-inch plywood to raise the level at the top of the stairs to make it level with the rest of the floor.

Then we cleared out and cleaned the area. That splash of white is paint from very early in the renovation when one of us butter-fingered a bowl of semi-gloss while painting the trim. 

Fortunately the red rosin paper covered everything and we were ready to lay flooring.

The most crucial pieces are always the threshold and boards that lead into it. That's where you want to ensure you're making 90-degree angles because otherwise your entire floor will be askew.

Here's how it looked all in place.

That left us with the part up to the stairs. We added a threshold in the doorway and had about 8 inches left to cover to ensure the rounded bullnose piece would overhang the top step the same as all the other treads.

Then we added a filler strip of about 3 inches to get us to the bullnose piece.

Then we had to get creative. The stair treads have a nice rounded bullnose edge but we couldn't use them at the top of the stairs. They're 1-inch high and our pine flooring is only 5/8-inches high. That would be too big a transition and could cause people to trip as they walked downstairs. The difference between the 5/8-inch flooring and the 3/4-inch boards we used for the threshold was manageable, so we decided to keep the latter height.

But a 3/4-inch pine board doesn't come with a rounded edge. What to do? That's a job that is perfect for a router. You start with a plain board.

Then select the right router bit for the job, in this case one that would make half of a hemisphere.

And you practice a lot to get the depth right and to router an end twice to make a full hemisphere.

The end result after some sanding looked remarkably like the edge on the store-bought treads.

More next time.

A bite sized project

Hello all. Phew, after the last few big projects here's a more manageable one to cleanse the palate. We don't have "before" photos of this closet because, well, it's a closet under the stairs. If you jump back to this post and scroll to the last picture the closet is the closed door across from the laundry room. After painting the ceiling, walls, and trim, our first big question was how to finish the floor, but deciding to remove the door made it natural to install our yellow pine boards.

This closet has the access door to the crawlspace. Because we can be kinda particular, we decided to make this look as seamless as possible. We made boards long enough to span the access door and beyond, cut them to size, and matched the halves.

After the access door it was fairly straight forward installation of boards we cut to the same length.

On the left side we used the right-angle to line up the seams of the boards because, again, we can be kinda particular. The small off-white strip will get painted a more neutral brown and is needed to allow the door to open fully.

The end was only tricky because the ceiling sloped quickly to nothing, leaving little room to maneuver. To finish the edge and cover a gap in the flooring we needed something and opted to use a piece of flooring as a border after we gave it an angle cut on the table saw to match the slope of the ceiling.

Then all that was left was to finish the floor and add baseboard to complete the picture.

Until next time.

And we're building a stairway...

Hello all. As we mentioned last time we couldn't leave the stairs in their sorry post-carpet state. Winding back the clock, this is what we started with:

Not a pretty sight. Our materials were some nice sanded plywood for the risers and a dozen of these nice pine treads:

The first step was to cut the 4x8-foot sheets of plywood to the right size and prepare the stairway for its makeover. The latter involved adding a small spacer strip along the bottom of each stair to make the risers flush. We used some spare pine and poplar that we had left over from other projects.

Then we had a foundation across the top and bottom onto which we could nail our new risers:

We only have a dozen treads for our fourteen stairs because at the very top and at the lower landing we're going to be manufacturing something out of pine boards. We didn't get that far in the project and will send an update when we have one. 

For now we needed a way to secure the treads and decided on a concealment technique that we demoed by drilling a 3/8-inch hole and verifying that it would exactly fit a 3/8-inch dowel rod:

With our concept proven we used the drill press to make accurate, centered, and precise holes on the treads after carefully noting the proper placement.

With these holes partially drilled we could finish the drilling in place for the screws. The 3/8-inch pocket was big enough for the screw's head to sink.

Next we glued little nubs of the dowel rod into the holes to hide the screwheads. An alternative design choice is to use decorative screws or maybe ones with a contrasting color, but we preferred an all-wood look.

Finally we used the dremel multitool to cut off the excess. A little trick we used to protect the stair treads was to cut a 1/2-inch hole out of some sturdy (but still thin) plastic we had. That way the saw blade as it vibrated back and forth wouldn't mark up the treads. It worked great and left only about 1/32-inch sticking above the tread that we can sand down.

In the end here's what the stairway became:

Until next time.

All the trimmings

Hello all. In a whole house renovation people rarely talk about the seemingly small projects that consume a lot of time and effort. And we mean a lot. Continuing a topic we teased briefly before, we're going to do a deep dive on baseboards. Every room has them, they're the unsung framing element that makes a room look "done". 

For example, after taking up the carpet we got rid of all the old, ugly brown baseboard to have a clean slate after we'd painted and installed our floor in the living room (this process has been replicated in multiple rooms by now).

Installing baseboard is mostly a process of careful measurement, angle cuts on the miter saw to make all the 45-degree joins, and probably a few tinkering cuts to get things to fit (almost no corner in a house is exactly 90-degrees). Compare that to how things looked after we cut, nailed in place, and applied three coats of paint:

This transformed the rooms and also the hallway:

And of course the bathrooms:

One place we couldn't simply replace the baseboard was in the stairwell. Well technically we could have (it's a renovation, about anything is possible if you're willing to spend the time, effort, or money) but that probably could have required removing the stairs first. That didn't strike us as a particularly cost-effective approach. This is what we were starting with:

Our first step was to give everything a light sanding to rough up the surface to make it hold paint better. Then we put on a coat of primer.

Then we could follow with two coats of semi-gloss white. The advantage of doing this work alongside the raw stairs is that you only have to be really careful along the seam to the wall.

You may have noticed in those last photos that the bannister was the same ugly reddish brown. Well, presumably the prior owners liked the color, but it didn't fit with our brighter color choices. The handrail along the wall and the bannister got sanding and a couple coats of wood stain. 

That worked great on the railing and the main post of the bannister but the newels (the skinny posts between the main one of the wall) are cheap wood and the stain brought out all the weird imperfections and odd streaks of grain. Suffice to say we didn't like it. What to do? Well the semi-gloss white paint was handy...

We're pleased with how things turned out, but as always welcome your reactions and thoughts. This is a bit of a two-parter because in the next episode we'll recount the work we did to remake the stairs.

Until next time.