Tag new stairs
In summer 2026, we completely replaced the primary staircase in our home.
New stairs, day 1
Today Jordan (a finish carpenter from Amish country) started on our stairs. The day was spent carefully planning the new rough framing and cutting one stringer. It’s painful to see so little progress after one full day, but I know a lot of ground has been covered and things will go faster from here.
It ended up working out that I also received delivery of most of the unfinished white oak stair parts from Hiland today. The foyer is filled up with treads, risers, skirt boards, handrail, and other odds and ends.
After Jordan left for the day, I put dye stain on a few pieces of skirt board. We have been going back and forth on the wisdom of prefinishing certain pieces of wood. There are many advantages to finishing everything in situ, but it also sounds like such a pain. So I found myself staining skirt boards at 8 pm on a wednesday evening and frantically applying a wash coat of Arm-R-Seal to lock it in. I think I’ll plan to pre-finish certain especially inconvenient pieces.
Today I removed what remained of our old staircase: treads, risers, and closed stringers on either side. (I’d already removed the plaster and lath basement-stairs ceiling attached to the underside of the stringers a few months prior.) This staircase needed to go so badly… At some point (in the early 80s, I think) someone replaced all the treads and risers with unattractive plain-sawn red oak. I’ve never been able to figure out how exactly someone replaced treads and risers of closed stringers without disturbing the ceiling below—since in that scenario, the only way to safely fasten these structural stair parts is from beneath. The point is that the old stairs were both moderately unsafe and unattractive. The closed stringers, visible as skirt boards, were majestic old chunks of pine with many visible signs of hand tools. It was a shame to remove them, but there really isn’t a way to salvage them at this point.
Later this week our new stairs will start going in. We’re using the spiral stairs in the back of our house while we’re without our primary staircase. It now takes five minutes to go upstairs and entails walking through the decrepit, blazing-hot back porch area.
