Designing a Staircase

There are a lot of choices out there if you are going to build and design your own staircase.  After doing a lot of research we decided that we wanted tiled treads and risers, wrought iron balusters and a wooden handrail. 

If you have never built stairs before I would suggest downloading some instructions off the internet.  There are tons of them out there.  They will give you the formula for what your tread and riser measurements should be for the length of stairway that you are building. 

First we had to make sure the stairs could support tile so we supported the treads with four stringers. 

I did a lot of searching for wrought iron balusters and found the best price online at http://www.mrstair.com/

They have all the stair parts you need to build your own stair case and the best part was this flash program that actually lets you design it.  http://www.mrstair.com/planningCC.html

The program not only allowed me to try different balusters and different arrangements but I could also print my design out. 

The hardest part was drilling the holes so they would line up straight.

We made a template out of an end piece of IPE wood that we could set on the hand rail and drill the right angle every time.  There were “shoes” as they call them that the balusters fit in for the bottom railing.  If you were going to use a wrought iron railing as well you would use shoes on top too but since we were using a wooden one we had to hand drill the holes.   The tricky part was getting top and bottom to match up evenly.  Using a template avoids errors in measuring. 

I found a really cool stained glass finial at Lowe’s.  Hardware stores  have a nice selection of finials these days.

It might seem intimidating but with proper planning and time, building a stair case and railing is a great DIY project.