Handrail for steps to front door - ideas please

Crikey John
That's been a lot of work. Did you have to underpin the house foundations?

Jimmy

 

You get what we used to call wreaths, that is where you get handrail going down on the inside of winders, the point where the stairs go around a turn without a landing, so the pitch of the stairs is much steeper than the pitch on the rest of the treads and risers, that is where the geometry comes in and to be honest I never really got my head round that properly.

The opposite side of the stairs you would normally have a wall rail and this one would obviously go down on a shallower pitch than the straight flights because the winders would be wider at the wall side than the normal treads.

The big trick is getting it all to blend in with the straight sections and flow correctly, so that when you run your hand down it its just one continuous flow.

 

Looks like a weekends and evenings job to me

Is that solid chalk under your house?

 

I was doing some work for a client that was building a large house in the Grange area of Edinburgh. There was a sweeping handrail on the stair. The joiner who tried to do it started at the bottom, gut stuck half way up as it turned and decided to leave the bit he was stuck on and start from the top and work down. It was horrendous - the bottom face of the rail were no where near being on the same plane and he'd attacked it with a rasp and sandpaper to try and blend the bits together.

I said to the client - surely your going to have to get the joiner back to your handrail. He replied that what we were looking at was the result of him having been back, infact it was his 3rd attempt and it was the best he could do.

It would have driven me nuts having to look at it all the time.

 

Yep, there is more to it than many realise if you intend doing it properly, its one of those occasions where the more you learn the more you realise how little you know.

 

Good you didn't have to. I've got a little bit of underpinning to do here. Its very time consuming as normally it can only be done in small sections.

 

Its painfully slow and laborious. I have to get the rooves sorted on the house here and part of that involves alterations to the kitchen and infilling part of the garden which will increase the kitchen size. I need to underpin part of the house but its only single storey so I'll probably just do it myself as its only about 3 metres and maybe 500mm below the foundations. I think movement with moisture content changes is the issue with clay - I think they call it clay heave. Were on heavy boulder clay here - its awful stuff to dig out.

 

I was just surprised to see so much chalk, nearly got your own "white cliffs" there

Got many rhododendron in the garden.

 

Move.

 

A nice length of led strip lighting set into whatever railing you choose will look rather snazzy