Staircase Construction

This past week, construction began on the new oak staircases at the Verona house. I’m replacing the old carpet stairs with new oak stairs, stained to match the hardwood floors. It’s a long, tedious process to cut the stair treads and risers exactly right, but it slowly began to take shape. First, the previous stairs had to be ripped out:

Before the new treads could start to go in, new support stringers had to be cut and installed, and we used plywood to raise up the stair frames by three quarters of an inch so that the new stairs would be at the same height as the old carpeted stairs and thus would be flush with the old skirt boards.

Once that was done, the new risers and treads, which had been custom manufactured and stained, could be cut and installed.

The result turned out beautifully! There is still a lot of trim work left to do, the railing needs to be reinstalled, and the nail holes need to be puttied, but it’s pretty easy to see how good the finished product is going to look.