No More Falling To Your Death

Last you saw them, our front stairs looked like this.

Here they are from the top. Not exactly child-friendly. Or adult friendly, really. It was hard not to imagine falling to your death through those giant gaps in the railings.

So, in what I'm hoping is the beginning of the end of our snail-railing saga (see here for the post where they first earned the name "snail railings", and here for the more recent update), I finally decided that our stairs needed to be finished.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. If you look at this old photo of Tom chiseling out the bottom of one of our stair posts, I've orange-circled something that is almost unidentifiable in the background.

That is a couple of pre-made fence railings.. Back before we built our front stairs, we were searching for various second-hand stair-related things on Gumtree. Tom got in touch with a guy who had some stairs advertised. The stairs wouldn't work for our purposes, but he was trying to get rid of some timber railings, which we willingly took off his hands. That is the only photo that I've managed to find of them. Bad blogger, I know.

We weren't going to be able to use them in their already-assembled condition, but we never look a gift horse in the mouth (what does that saying even mean?), so we were determined to use them somehow. We ended up using a couple of the top and bottom rails already...

And we lined up all of the vertical palings (it's amazing how they seem to multiply when you dismantle them) and undercoated them. All of them. Front back and sides. Not much fun.

And then we held one up against the stair railings, and trial-ed and error-ed cutting the top and bottom off so that we could get the right angle.

Then we labeled it as our template, and I marked about 80 more with that same angle, top and bottom.

And Daniel ran them through the drop saw to cut those angles.

It wasn't a perfect system, since the angle wasn't absolutely consistent across each of the railing sections, but it at least got the bulk of the cuts done upfront, and we then only had to make minor adjustments when one didn't fit. Which brings me to the exciting part...

I measured the width of each railing section (not along the diagonal angle, just a straight line from vertical post to vertical post). And then I used my amazing maths skills to figure out how many palings could fit within that space. Our palings are 60mm wide, and we decided that we liked a 40mm gap between each one, so the only flexible measurement was the gap on either end (where paling would meet vertical post). Considering that I work in finance so I should have been good at this, it was surprisingly difficult to actually end up with consistent gaps on either end.

In reality, it's quite an easy process. It just takes a mind-numbingly loooooong time.

First step? Insert paling, and make sure it is vertically level. Oh, and please don't mind the awful brown stains on some of the palings. We actually painted them months ago and then stacked them all up together in a place where they obviously got a bit wet, and therefore stained.

Then, hammer in a little nail at the bottom of the paling, making sure it's at an angle that will drive it into the bottom rail. The nail in this photo is not quite at the right angle.

Then, check the level again, and tap with the hammer to get it nice and vertical (if necessary). I hammered a nail straight through the front of the top rail into the paling to make the top nice and secure too, since there wasn't enough room to tap a nail into the side of the paling.

To get the space between each paling nice and consistent, I cut a little piece of bottom rail to the right width (40mm). It was handy because it was an offcut that was already cut to the same angle as the railings, meaning it nestled nicely into the gap between palings.

I always left it wedged in there while I hammered in the nail at the bottom of the new paling.

Allie supervised, as always.

And then, it was a matter of repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat. Thankfully any mistakes I made in my maths calculations worked out ok, so there aren't really any obviously strange gaps.

I did run into some trouble when I reached the last section of the day (of course) at about 6:10pm, with 20 minutes to go until our noise curfew began. This is the little section right up against the house near the front door. We'd used one of the free second-hand railings in this section. The ones we'd bought from Bunnings to supplement the older ones had an underside in an upside-down U-shape, where the paling slots into the gap. The old ones that we got for free had only one side of the upside-down U, so the paling wasn't held in at the back, making it harder to nail them in properly. The added disadvantage of not having easy access to the other side (damn house in the way) meant that I had to screw those palings in instead of nailing them. Not only was that hard because the old railings were made of hardwood and not pine like the newer railings, but with time running out for me to keep making noise, it was a race to the finish line. I think if there were railing-screwing olympics, I would be a definite competitor for gold! I had my drill-bit-to-counter-sinker-to-philips-head changes down to the same kind of speed as tyre-changing for car racing! And I just made it in time!

And it was all worth it. Aren't they pretty?

Now for the painting. Sigh.

How about a before and after?

BEFORE

AFTER