Spindle me this: A railing makeover

This project definitely qualifies as an impossible made possible, so I’m linking up to the Imagine the Impossibilities blog hop at it all started with paint.

When we moved into our house in 2001, there was this not-so-decorative gaping hole in the ceiling:

Why the gaping hole? Well, it’s the opening to the loft, which is an awesome 500 sq ft room that was completely inaccessible for the first six years that we lived here. Because as you can see, there’s no staircase up to the loft. Why anyone would build an awesome room with no way to reach it, I have no idea. But finally in 2007, we had a staircase installed. YAY!

When Luigi the Flooring Guy sanded, stained, and finished the flooring that we installed in the loft, he also finished the new staircase. And then he came back later that year to refinish the flooring on the main floor.

And this is where the makeover story begins. We needed to add a railing to the new staircase and around the opening in the loft, but I wasn’t crazy about the original railing. There wasn’t really anything wrong with it, but I wanted something different. So when Luigi came back later in 2007 to refinish the main floor, out came the existing railing. Seeing as we were planning to replace it with something new, it made sense to remove it at that point.

I really like the look of metal spindles with a stained wood rail. I found this railing online, and decided that this was the railing that I wanted:

 

Hubby decided that he would make the railing, because, well, that’s how he rolls. He’d rather spend hours and hours and hours – stretching into months, stretching into years – to do something that a professional could get done in a couple of weeks. He thought and calculated and Auto CAD’d and came up with an initial design:

As I said, this goes back to 2007. Forward to the spring of 2010, and hubby still hadn’t figured out how to make the metal spindles without the welds showing. I called a metal guy who came over to give us a quote. We needed about 60 feet of railing (around the loft opening, down the stairs, along the main floor, and down the basement stairs). When the guy quoted $8,000-$9,000 to build the metal spindles, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I decided I could live with just plain square metal spindles, but that quote came in at around $5,000. Grrrrrr. So the project was on hold again.

At the beginning of 2011, the first thing I wrote down at the top of my to-do list for the year was FINISH RAILING. But how? Maybe I’d just have to give up on the metal spindles and go with wood after all. And then it hit me…

Could hubby build the spindles out of wood and then we could have them painted to look like metal. Ah-ha! Hubby liked that idea, and finally after all those years of waiting and thinking, he got to work. First, be built the newel posts. I was sure I’d taken some in-progress pictures, but I can’t find them anywhere. And I can’t find the inspiration picture either. But anyway, the newel posts were built and stained around June/July, and then hubby built the spindles this past summer and fall. And by mid-November, they were ready to be painted. YAY!

{Before I tell you what happened next, keep in mind that this project had been going on since 2007. Hubby had spent what seemed like forever planning and designing and cutting and routering and sanding and building the newel posts and wooden spindles.}

When the spindles were finally finished, I brought them to a paint shop that specializes in spraying wood. They sprayed the first coat, and hubby and I headed over on a Sunday morning in late November to take a look at the spindles before they sprayed the next coat. When we arrived at the shop, there were fire trucks in the parking lot. There had been a fire in the shop an hour earlier. ARE YOU FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME?!?!? Nooooooooooooooooo!

There was no actual fire damage, but soot was on everything and the shop owner told us that because of smoke damage, everything in the shop would most likely have to be scrapped. I reiterate – ARE YOU FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME?!

A couple of days later, the shop told us that they would be able to save the spindles after all. WHEW! I couldn’t imagine having to start that whole project all over again! And a few weeks later, we picked up the painted spindles.

We both had the week between Christmas and New Years off, so we kicked it into high gear and got the rails cut & stained & varathaned, and then it was time. The big moment I’d been waiting for since 2007 – the railing was installed! Our railless house went from this:

 

To this!

Staircase before:

Staircase after:

Looking down from the loft before:

Looking down from the loft after:

Looking up at the loft before:

Looking up at the loft after:

Looking down the hall before:

Looking down the hall after:

And from the other direction (in the midst of painting the hallway) before:

And after:

Newel posts:

    

And a few more random shots…

 

I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled I am with our new railing, It took forever to get it done, but in the end, it was worth all the aggravation and frustration and the constant “I can make it” proclamations from hubby. The change to the overall look and feel of our house is so much more than I expected, and I couldn’t be happier with how the railing came out. It was a vision in my mind for so long, but I wasn’t sure how it would look in real life. And I have to say, it looks even better than I envisioned :-) And now we can have people over without worrying about them falling through the big holes in the floor!

I’m linking up our railing makeover to Metamorphosis Monday over at Between Naps on the Porch and to Making the World Cuter. Be sure to check out these two great blog parties :-)