Starting stair assembly

Home » Article » Starting stair assembly
It's about Finish
Posted Oct 8, 10:09 PM

For the stairs, Melissa assembled the return on the left side of the treads (biscuit joinery, clamped, and sanded) and painted all the risers and skirts, while I’m doing the actual measuring, cutting, trimming, shimming and glueing/nailing. Once I’m done, she’s going to put in the dowel to hide the screws, and all the sanding/painting/staining.

We ran into a number of problems with the first couple treads- I ended up having to rabbit & dado two risers in order to make them fit without sticking out too far. The real problem is that $#^$!#% stair people only stock 11.25” and 11.5” stairs, assuming homeowners are ONLY putting in code-minimum 10” run stairs regardless of proper design formula that, in my case, worked out to 11” run. Interestingly enough, code requires 11” minimum for commercial applications, but we couldn’t find ANY treads designed for that. (Code requires 10” stairs to have a .75-1.5” nosing; 11” stairs don’t require any nosing) Needless to say, 11.25” treads on an 11” wide staircase gives a .25” nosing look rather dumb. Home Depot’s treads were 11.5” wide, giving a half-inch nosing that still looks dumb, but was the best we could do. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give much room for error…

So, here’s where are are tonight. The skirts are up along the wall, all the treads are assembled, and most are sanded and ready for final trim & install. We have 3 completely installed, waiting for final finishing:

Steps 14, 15 & 16, glued and screwed in place.

The rest of the railing parts arrived today, too, and a gal from Home Depot came to measure for carpet. We also noted an error where Home Depot overcharged us $95 for board we didn’t buy- the manager said they’ll check store cameras and call us back. What a pain in the ass…