With the rise of home renovations, every single room is being design lead. Once upon a time people once said kitchens and bathrooms sell houses. That is true to an extent but now it’s the complete package. So rooms which might have been thrown a bit of paint over to spruce things up are now part and parcel of the complete home décor. In particular to this is staircases.
A staircase is typically at the front of the house, in a hall way or maybe in a living room or maybe an extravagant central piece! Now to take out the staircase completely can be very messy, frustrating or even costly. Many things to consider, the compromises of the wall the staircase is against, maybe there’s an under stair room which could be hindered, the dust, the time involved. Which is why staircase renovations are the way to go! In essence it’s keeping you existing staircase in place and changing the bannister! Usually takes a couple of days and hassle free, 90% of most existing staircases are structurally sound meaning that a renovation is more than possible.
So what’s involved?
Well, from my experience with staircase renovations Oak & Glass has really taken off and really does transform the hall way. Allows a lot of light into what can be light deprived rooms. Oak gives the staircase character giving a great contemporary look.
So to begin with all your existing newel posts will be replaced with engineered oak ones. If unsure what a newel post is, it’s all the big upright posts. Your handrails, base rails and your spindles get replaced too for oak other than the spindles. So once where you had spindles will now be typically 10mm toughened clear glass. Don’t worry its very strong and can last the test of time, whether you have held by metal clips or integrated into the handrails and base rails.
How many pieces of glass would you need? Well it depends on the size of your staircase. If you have a straight flight staircase would typically mean it would be 2 pieces up the rake (Rake meaning up the stairs). If you have a rather large landing, then it could be between 1 -2 pieces of glass between newel posts.
So that’s what I would call the basics of the renovations. Changing posts, handrails, base rails, post caps & glass but are there any other options.
The answer is YES…Yes there are!
So if you look along your steps it would look like a piece of skirting board follows up the side of the staircase and under the base rail on the opposite side. These are called Strings, and you can have the strings veneered on oak to complement the staircase. That’s the wall string and the inner string. To match the board on the outside, this would be veneered too and the board on the landing called an apron. So now your existing staircase would appear to look like a completely solid oak staircase!
At this point you could decide to have a feature step which would be replacing you existing first step for a solid oak one. If you decided lets go for it! Let’s have all the steps in oak. Then the steps (treads and risers) would have a 22mm solid oak step fitted on top of the existing step with a veneer on the riser. Typically the steps would be in a non-slip finish.
And there you have it! A staircase renovation! This blog hasn’t exhausted all the ranges available as other finishes such as walnut, beech & painted finishes could be used other than oak. Also rather than glass a range of different spindles from contemporary to traditional to wrought iron could be best suited to for you staircase design.
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