Seems to be a lot of Loan Marketing lately on Kamazooie. This is not really my idea of extraordinary experiences but you never know. Buying a new house is definitely a major life event so I guess getting a great home loan could be the start of something great.

Well my situation is a little different; we’re still renovating after many years in the same house. One of my last projects was replacing the old parquet flooring on the main floor with more modern pre-finished oak hardwood. That’s easy enough to do and there are a lot of DIY videos for solid, engineered and laminate hardwood instillation. Well that was only the beginning of my nightmare. In order to dress up the house a little, we decided to go with a nice dark chocolate stained oak and that did work out fine for the dining room, family room and living room.  The problem was, we still had a blonde oak varnished spiral stairs leading to the second floor.

The plan then became to adopt another popular look these days with the dark stained stair-tops and hand-rail with white risers, spindles and trim.  Okay, that’s not a bad plan, but what happens when you get to the top of the stairs and you’re back to the blond varnished parquet flooring?  Okay that had to go too but what about the difference in thickness between the existing floor and the new plank hardwood? Not a problem right? Except for the fact that there’s a nice solid oak bull-nose that outlines the stairwell and matches with the floor height. Not to mention that this is the portion of the construction that holds all of the spindles which would have to come out to raise the bull-nose or replace it totally.  Getting quotes on doing the work wasn’t that helpful. I was able to find someone to quote doing the stair stripping, staining and varnishing but they wouldn’t touch the spindles and handrail because of the amount of work there. So I decided to tackle it myself.

So here’s me hand painting the last of the spindles in my garage. It actually turned out to be one of the best parts of the job because I could hide away in my garage to sand, hang and paint all 52 of these individually while listening to my favorite tunes with no one to tell me to turn down the volume.  As it turned out, I found that the best way to approach the problem was to remove all of the spindles, raise the same bull-nose to match the new flooring thickness and reinstall the newly painted spindles. 

The order of operations was actually pretty key since there a lot of tricks to assembling the railing so that you don’t see any screws or nails. Not a big deal but if you’re interested, let me know and I can message you or add some additional notes to the blog.  

Here’s a picture of the finished product. I'm quite happy its done but I don’t think I would tackle another one for a while. I started the project during the May long weekend and didn’t finish until Thanksgiving. Always willing to give pointers on how to do it though. Maybe one of those cheap home loans wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. Happy house hunting or renovating.