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.