Rumors of my death are exaggerated. We have been in the house for 6 weeks now and absolutely loving it. You gracious readers have been very patient with my pitiful blogging output over this time but I hope to get back on the wagon after Christmas. I'll start with a wrap up on our beautiful stair rails. I did two earlier posts about Marc Maiorana and his design process. We ended up coming down to the wire with Marc and his girlfriend Robin coming down the Friday before a Monday final inspection on the house. We loaded in all of the rail parts on Friday evening and decided to get some rest and jump in full force on Saturday morning. I was in awe of Marc's level of cool--he didn't even check to see that the rails fit. I was nervous as hell. There were a lot of inspection issues around the rails and so many opportunites to derail us getting a final. The tolerances were incredibly tight. The rails looked beautiful and Marc had come up with an ingenious design to give the illusion of a continuous rail through the stair tread.
We arranged for Mark Burford who built the steps to come Saturday morning to make the tread penetrations.
The bottom section under the tread has a smaller diameter inner rod that penetrates the tread and inserts inside the upper vertical and is secured by flush allen screws. The bottom section is bolted into the stair stringer. The fit was unbelievably solid.
Marc makes a small edit on the connecting rod.
He went to considerable trouble to ensure that there were no openings in the rail greater than the code required 4 inches.
The guest pod rail verticals do not penetrate the treads as we don't have the overlap there but they presented their own challenges with a bump out for the slight overlap of the tread and the need to get a solid attachment to the stringer.
The infill panels required to meet code were the only nightmare on the project. We decided on using formaldehyde free maple veneer plywood with iron on edge banding. The four of us worked until 2:30 in the morning on Monday to get a crude but viable set of panels cut, fitted, sanded, and mounted.
Robin finished up with some touch up paint.
Here's the final main stair rail with panels in place.
And final without.
The breakfast nook gets incredible light from the southern windows above.
Fripp can't decide which ray of sunshine to bask in.
We are talking to an artist named Seth Rolland in Washington State about a table for the nook. It is a beautiful design called the Oxeye table. The radial petals are sculpted from a continuous piece of sustainably harvested ash that was cut and opened like a fan.
Stay tuned and have a fantastic holiday.
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