Home Improvement Today?

Set up a 12' X 24' above ground pool with a little help from a buddy. Letting the kids play in it while it fills and me in the background hooking up the pump and filter.

 

Cut some low hanging branches to prep for a future fire pit and took down the old tree house that was up in the back yard last week.

 

I did! minus the pressure treated parts of the swingset/tree house.

 

I have about a 1/2 cord of lumber scraps in my woodshed right now , lol

 

Digging trench to extend conduit to corner of cement patio, so wifey can plug in her fountain in a different spot. She's getting even with me for my recent mods!

 

Different shed

 

That I haven't found in my shed yet but did watch one in about 18 of water chasing fish about 75' from my house

 

Complete home upgrade. Sold the old place after 4 days on the market and bought a new build with 800 more sqft 3/2/2 with split floor plan. Been moved in for a couple months. So far just added a fence, storage solutions/workbench to garage, and finally making progress on getting all the weeds out of the lawn. Lots of small things planned.

 

That's one way to do it

 

Yeah, it was the most sensible solution considering we wanted to replace windows, flooring, countertops, etc. If we would have done all the improvements, we would have never recouped the cost, got the additional square footage or went with as high quality of upgrades like travertine, real wood floors, and custom cabinets.

 

Id have to add pics, but putting an epoxy seal coat on our garage floor, 1/3 done the repainting the walls.

 

Working on finishing garage with OSB (beaver barf) on the walls. Built overhead shelf and firewood bin.

 

So I thought I was basically done with my stair railing , last thing to do was install the glass clips once they arrived and then create a template for the glass panel .

I installed the clips on Friday and the reaction from my wife was less than enthusiastic and after I looked at it for a while I would be lying if I didn't agree that the glass clips just didn't work with the rest of the railing .

So .... Change Order processed ... and new plan established , decided to go with some spindles

( which is what my wife suggested in the beginning , I heard that more than once over the weekend )

however my installation of the glass clips left me with some unsightly holes from the fasteners . I didn't think I could repair the holes adequately so I decided to lay out the spindles in a way that the holes would be covered and still meet our code requirement for spindle spacing .

I also needed to sand the base and underside of the railing to bare wood which I managed with my palm sander and Fein Multimaster connected to my Rigid shop vac

I also decided to reinforce the spindle connections with 5/16 dowels which I rigged up my little tabletop bench press to drill at 90 degrees to the seat cut of the spindles , orienting the dowels in this way made drilling the corresponding holes in the hand rail and base easier with my hand drill . I used a 9mm brad point drill bit in my cordless drill , because the 9mm bit is just a hair larger than 5/16" it gave me a tiny bit of margin for moving the spindles to get them aligned properly once i rotated them into their holes and plumb

Today I got all the spindles laid out , cut , fitted and installed dry with the dowels . Tomorrow I can take them back out , sand off my layout marks from the base and handrail and then reinstall them with glue

The 3 sets of twinned black walnut spindles mimic the 3 black watnut spindles that support the curved handrail in the lower section

 

Watered the lawn.

 

Is that what you kids are calling it these days ?

 

Teh rainberd

 

With a fully housed piece of glass it would have needed to be installed before the hand rail and the hand rail would need to be removeable in case you ever had to replace the glass which means I couldn't hide the fasteners inside the newel boxes , besides that the ends are shaker panels so a glass groove there would look shitty . I like glass clips over grooves any day but it wasn't just the clips that didn't really fit the look , the whole glass panel thing just didn't seem like it was going to work with the style of the rest

The lower railing is already complete , no glass or spindles to add there

 

Here's how my stairs and hand rail turned out. These railings are a real PITA. First cut them to width, then cut the spindles the length, then waste hours trying to cut the spacers for between the spindles correctly. The end ones need to be cut so the spindles are spaced evenly from the posts, and the spacers between the spindles keeps them all tight. But I couldn't seem to get it right without just trial and error, and taking the whole thing apart about 5 times.

I'm so glad I don't need a railing around the whole deck.

 

Looks great

A good trick for laying out spindle spacings like that is to take all of your spindles that you would need for that specific section and push them all tight to one end , measure the remaining distance from the stacked spindles to the next post and divide by how many spaces you would need ( # of spindles + 1 )

 

Thanks!

That's a good tip. Definitely would've helped for the straight section. The angled section was even more of a pita because in order for the spindles to be plumb the spacers at each end actually had to be different sizes. Otherwise an end spindle would hit the top mounting bracket and cause it to not be parallel to the others.