DIY Staircase Makeover

Alright boys and girls, the most fun part of any home improvement project is of course the demo day, make sure you are safe, wear glasses, gloves, boots, when you see my wife decides to be too pretty and didn't wear shoes. the first few hits against the wall above her, but she is safe from time to time, make sure you turn off the power you don't want, let the power run through that room, you don't want to hit any of the wires and create a mess there . So once that's done, it's helpful to pre-cut a lot of the sections that you're going to split that way, you don't demonstrate too many things and create more problems down the road and then you find the biggest hammer you have and then you start.

Take everything down and let your imagination run wild, look at that blank canvas you're creating, so for the framing now, if I could I would have allowed you to focus on a specific section of this build more than any other section I would say. It's the frame, it's your base, if you mess up this part you're going to have a lot of trouble customizing every little piece after them and troubleshooting and troubleshooting, so take your time and make sure your walls are straight, they're in position. vertical and most importantly. The part is that if you have transition pieces like I have here, where one side of the railing comes one direction and then turns and turns, it creates a very difficult way to connect the two when it comes to attaching molding when it comes to place the metal. railing at the top, so calculate and plan things.

I regret not putting in a small downhill section maybe four inches deep or wide and then continuing it again, it probably saved me a lot of hassle, but that's my advice to learn from my mistake. The good thing is that we now have everything figured out for the drywall. Drywall usually comes at your hardware stores in quarter inch, 3/8 1/2 inch, and 5/8. Make sure you take out a little bit of the wall to see how thick it will be which will make it easier to mud later in my situation, although it's a half inch drywall, nothing special. The best way I found to make drywall cutouts is to take a piece of paper. and draw the shape and then measure from each side to each corner and then go out to your garage and then start tracing that exact pattern when it comes to speeding up the cutting process, use your utility knife with a straight edge as a level on the situation on the white part and then turn it over and break it, it will break exactly perfectly on that line.

It's really fascinating, it's a lot of fun, and it works much better than just using one of those drywall knives. All drywall is hung with screws, but for corners it is recommended to use drywall nails mainly because the head of the nail is flush and flat, which makes it much easier to apply the joint compound on top and not will interfere. On the way now to taping the joints in the drywall you will need some tools, you will need a six inch jointing knife, a 10 inch taping knife and a 14 inch drywall test if you want to get a hot can spend extra money, it's a small dish that you can put the compound in, it makes it a lot easier, but you can get away with doing it a different way when it comes to mixing the content itself, it's all-purpose joint compound and Basically, you want it to be the consistency of ketchup on a palette, so add a little more honor in there and mix it up and you're ready to apply a first coat on the joints and then place the tape on top. your drywall tape follow the drywall tape with your drywall tape knife with a thin layer of the compound being applied over it, let the sucker dry overnight, once it is dry, sand a little and then start applying a wider section of the sanding tape to that part. all the edges with 150 grit sandpaper using a pole sander once this is done you are ready to apply a thin coat of the actual texture in my situation.

I have the fall, you may have the orange peel. Two applications are very different, so do your research to see what is the best technique to get the texture you have and then you will be ready to paint. Here's a harsh reality for you: your drywall is not straight and no part of your house will have a perfectly straight drywall line, etc. You should anticipate that your stairs will be the same way, so each step in a sense has to be almost like a perfect and customizable cut. Now, to make this process a little easier, I've created a little multi-measurement tool, so to speak, and basically everything I do.

What I did was make two small cuts in the back of the two extra pieces of laminate flooring that I had that had little locking slots, so I would basically line up the width of the royal

staircase

tread that I would need and fasten it with a small clamp. I'll then take this custom measurement to my actual

staircase

tread, which is about 94 inches long and is nice and long to accommodate most stairs out there. I'll make my mark and then take it to my miter saw to create the final cut using a 40 tooth blade on my miter saw.

After cutting I would make a dry foot making sure there was no gap larger than a sixteenth of an inch on each side that way the sixteenth of an inch can be hidden using putty once the fit was perfect I would then place a pattern on liquid nail adhesive zig zag, I would install the tread using a mallet on the corners of the tip and pushing it in slowly but surely without rushing the process or else your nose will now be broken from the trim work. I have found that the inexpensive alternative to picking up individual pieces of prefinished molding is to purchase a 4x8 sheet of high-density MDF at your local hardware store.

There is about 30 dollars per sheet. In fact, I end up only needing one sheet for the entire project, including the stair risers and molding. I just broke it with my chain saw. You can always use a ruler and a circular saw or your table saw. I secured everything with glue and nails and then make sure to go over everything using the putty to fill all the holes and sand them well so they are all finished now when it comes to painting the second piece the tip I will give you when working with MDF is to include take an extra step. where you have to apply primer first if you do what I did and a lot of people do is you just put a lot of extra layers of paint and primer together, and the MDF ends up absorbing it in the first few layers, kind of like a sponge and it just looks transparent, like this So to save the minimum number of coats, put on one or two coats of primer first and then you'll only need one or two coats of paint when it comes to getting a nice crisp paint line.

I have a professional painter who gave me this little tip where he said to first mask it and put a coat of paintable cult on it, spread it with your finger and then put a new coat of paint on it and before the cult or the paint is dry, remove the piece of tape carefully and then you will see that sharp line. The downside is that if you let it dry too long you'll end up seeing that more jagged line, so that's the little tip I learned from him and I hope that's the case. I'll help you with the risers.

I use the rest of my MDF pieces and custom cut all the individual risers using that custom measuring tool I created for the stair treads and created each individual piece tailored to each step. On the back I wrote steps number one to sixteen. I placed a piece of masking tape around the bottom of the stair tread which made it easy for me to remove those pieces after they were all the perfect fit and dry once everything is done, I brought it to the garage and created this pattern. I don't know what to call it. I don't know if it's halfway between herringbone and chevron, but it really looks cool.

It's not an original idea, but this is how I did it. I used the sled on my Craig table saw, set the miter to 30 degrees, and created these quarter-inch deep slots. I then flipped the piece and created the same one on the other side and then a straight 90 degree alignment. down the middle once I made all the cuts and everything was ready to paint just before I put the paint and primer on, what I did was take a piece of 150 grit sandpaper, folded it in half and went through each channel with one or two small slots.

Stroke at a time, mainly because when it comes to painting, I think a lot of the little fibrous materials in the wood will start to lift up and not be as neat and crisp, so take a little time and feel some sanding on your inside. It's not a lot of work, you can just remove it in just a few minutes when it comes to painting. This time I applied one or two coats of primer and then finished it with two coats of hyper white, I think that's all it took and it turned out much faster and with a better finish than when I did the finishing work on my steps, once I the paint was dry, installing the stair risers couldn't have been easier and I think that's because We took the time to custom number all the risers on the back, tailored to the exact destination of the risers. stairs, so when the time comes, all you have to do is place a couple of silicone beads on the back of each riser and snap it into place. and secure it using three brad nails once the brad nails were done on all the risers, all you have to do is reapply a light coat of caulk on all the holes, touch it up with the exact paint left over from painting the risers. risers and then right after.

I just finished making all the baseboards around the staircase and am ready to start working on the actual railing for the banister. The first parts I want to start with are actually the posts, so the first step is to figure out the angle that the post would sit at, so all I took was a T-bevel and put a little magnetic level on it once I found the true center of the stud, I then discovered that the angle was what I needed. To use a protractor and then I started cutting things using a diamond blade with my cuts cut for the metal, for the actual materials that I used, it was the wall thickness O six five, which is basically an eighth of an inch thick when treats.

For the steel, the M post cells were two by two, the top of the railing was 2 by 1 and then the small individual slats H, if you will, ran down horizontally, now we have a 1/2 material. 2 inch by 1/2 inch. Due to the nature of the railing where it angles and rotates in different directions, I knew it wasn't realistic for me to build in my garage and then try to assemble it and make it work in my house, so my best execution was to install the post upright. first make sure they are nice and straight and then weld each individual piece into place safely, which allowed me to make sure everything moved and everything lined up exactly where it needed to be.

I used a welding blanket under my surface I was working on to make sure the little spatters and sparks didn't set my house on fire and didn't damage all the hard work that had already been done once everything was secured my wife took everything off and brought it to my garage and then I finished everything with strong strong weld beads in the garage, once all the welding and polishing was done I was ready to start degreasing. I greased it with acetone to make sure that none of the oils and greases would interfere with the finish color that we are going to put on it now originally my plan was to powder coat these railings and honestly it was too expensive to do so So I decided to give it a more DIY approach and being metal I decided Treat it like a car and what a car would withstand its durability so first I applied a self etching automotive primer.

It is a primer that would be applied to the bare metal of the car before the paint was applied once the primer was applied. ready to start putting the paint on and to paint again, I glued on the side of the car and used an oleum oxide matte black auto finish paint. They advertised this for car spoilers and hoods and things like that, so I knew I was willing to hold out. some of the environments outside the house than inside the house