Portfolio: Victorian Renovation

The centerpiece of the house is the new stairway, created to appear as if it has always been there. This involved the delight of getting to work with a lot of custom millwork, produced at a local specialty shop and then pre-finished by the homeowners. Here I am paring out a shallow shoulder at the base of the main newel post.

Installing the newel post

Each of these pickets required five cuts (one for the angle, and two for each shoulder) to create this shallow tenon, which then fits into a slot on the underside of the handrail. There were 90 pickets, so doing the math, that’s 450 passes through the saw just to create this one shape. Each picket had to also be cut for length, and there were three or four different lengths of pickets. I lost track of how many cuts it all was.

Production cutting. A small jig on the tablesaw kept the cuts in alignment. The pickets are carefully kept in order in different stacks.

The finished stairway.