changing gears ... again.

So my laundry room still sits half-mudded. My bedroom still missing walls. But I built a bed for J and one morning sitting on my front porch with coffee it struck me whoa, I could build porch stair railings! Uhh, not really helping those other projects but I got excited about the idea of building and doing more woodworking. Much more fun than mudding drywall.

So I plunked down eighty bucks on lumber a couple of weeks ago and had Julian prime them for me. Finally, last Saturday evening on a more-like-normal-but-this-year-abnormal-almost-summer-like day of sun and slightly warmish out I decided it was time to install the posts. I needed them in place before I could measure and cut the 2x4s and other lumber to make the railings.

I had borrowed Trevor's post hole digger to dig the holes - worked great. So step one then was to roughly cut the 4x4 fir posts to the height they would be when buried 18" in the ground so I'd be able to hack them off to the precise height with my circ saw once I got to that point. Then, mix concrete - yea!

It's a lot like making brownies. Really heavy brownies. In a wheelbarrow. With a shovel. OK, OK but the consistency I was after was about like brownie mix. So there. I poured some dry mix into each hole, plopped the posts in and poured in some concrete. No sweat. It was kind of fun and now I can add concrete work to my resumé of remodeling chores.

I used some scrap 1x4 trim from the stuff I tore out of the laundry room to hold them level after making sure they were with my trusty 4' level. Easy peasy. Then did the same things for the front staircase -

And wallah - posts for new railings -

The design will match the existing porch railings which are built out of 2x4s and 1x4s (it was the realization of how simple the design was that prompted me to say I can build that!) and the only conundrum is the fact I do not want to paint the new railings the ugly tan/brown combo so I'm not sure how to deal with that. I'll have to revisit this photo and see what color scheme to use - likely the vertical 1x4s will be a contrasting color and everything else will be painted white. So it won't match - for now. Oh well.

Anyways - it will be fun to build the railings.