I completed the staircase just shy of our 4th anniversary of being in the house. From beginning the project to finish spanned about seven months. If I did it for a living, I'd have to live on about $300/month. Never having finished stairs before, I spent many days staring at the roughed in stairs trying to figure out what comes first, so I didn't have to rebuild something. With the help of a stair building book and lots of time thinking, I finally figured out how to approach it.

We wanted something different from the typical, same old balustrades that most stair builders install. I used some ideas from pictures of early 20th century arts and crafts homes. I used quarter sawn white oak for most of the solid wood on the balustrade and newell. A guy outside Oxford with a portable sawmill cut a white oak log he got from a national forest. I dried the lumber in the loft of my shop for about a year before using it. The handrail was made using the table saw to make the cove shape and the router table for the smaller curves (I couldn't find a railing I liked, and mine was a lot cheaper than a bought one).