We took on a handrail installation job awhile back in an nineteenth century farmhouse out in Weston. The homeowner had finished widening and re-doing the staircase recently but wanted to hire out the handrail installation. Right away we could tell that the design of the handrail was going to prove to be a very finicky install. The newel posts are round and didn’t come with any trim or beauty ring to cover where they come into contact with the floor, the floor and stair treads are already installed and finished, the handrail needed seamless transitions and the spindles were designed to be installed without shoe molding.
Setting the newel posts was the first problem to tackle. The floor and treads in the house aren’t perfectly flat given their age and it certainly wasn’t an option to install the posts with unsightly gaps at the floor even if the floor was uneven. What I ended up doing was cutting a 1/16” recess in the floor with a template and a router bit to get an extremely exact fit. Then using structural screws and an anchoring epoxy the posts were set blind into the recess with no exposed fasteners.
Building the seamless handrail from the parts provided by the manufacturer ended up not being incredibly difficult but required a lot of patience and parts had to be repeated cut and recut until the fit was exact. Once the handrail was built and installed onto the posts I marked the layout of all the balusters on the floor and stair treads and transferred those marks from the floor to the bottom of the handrail with a laser level.
Lastly the client wanted the ½” square wrought iron balusters installed into the floor without any shoe trim to cover the transition between the floor and the spindle. The easiest way to deal with this was to cut a ½” square hole in the floor for each spindle by first drilling a ½” round hole and then squaring the hole off with a ½” square mortise chisel one by one.
In the end being extremely exact and taking a considered approach to this project allows all the fine detail work of the installation to show through.
