A full seven months ago, in September 2011 we started building our front stairs with digging the holes for our posts (see here). Then, because it took us so long to complete each next stage, when we finally got to the handrails in November, I labeled that post Snail Railings because it had taken us such a long time to put them up. But even then, we were nowhere near finished.
Because the stairs still looked like this.
A small child could easily fall through the gap between the stairs and the top rails, even though we've managed to at least get a bottom rail on since.
Unfortunately we're not quite ready to correct that particular problem. What we are ready to do is to attach some steel reinforcement bars underneath the stairs to prevent the timber from warping over time. First... measuring where to put each bar...
And then drilling holes for them...
After we drilled the hole in the first side, we measured again on the other side, drilled another hole, and pushed our reinforcement bar through from one side to the other.
We'd fortunately also managed to buy some Loctite, which is a little red-coloured liquid that you poor onto the end of the bolt before attaching the nut to it to make sure it won't loosen over time.
So each end looked like this. Thrilling, isn't it?
Oh but not before we had to grind off any excess on the reinforcement bar, because we'd bought long ones that would make two reo bars for us when cut in half. The fireworks made it a little more thrilling...
Here's Tom working on tightening the last bar...
It's unfortunately one of the more boring improvements we've made lately (perhaps even more boring than re-hanging the back door to open outwards instead of inwards), but at least there were fireworks! And it may just have given us the kick up the backside that we need to finally get those stair railings completed! Here's hoping!
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