Snow Days Library Stairs!

For a town that freaks out when we get 5" or more of snow, to be hit with 36" means we shut down for almost a week.  Stuck at home with nothing to do: NEVER!  I have a mansion to work on (and 3 young kids who need hot chocolate, snow pants put on and off, and a driveway/sidewalk that need shoveling, and a dog who, it turns out, is afraid of windy snow gusts and needs a path shoveled so she can do her business)!

But in between the various snow related activities, I put together the library spiral stair case!  It is a special order spiral staircase kit by Alessio.  He makes a (nicer, IMO) spiral staircase kit but it takes up 5" diameter of space in the house.  I only had 4" diameter of space I could spare for the stairs so I contacted him and requested this kit be made to only take up the smaller diameter.  The treads aren't as finely detailed as his 5" diameter steps which have a pretty design on them (as opposed to mine that have two rows of square holes), but this kit met my important criteria of 4" diameter -- plus I have a pretty scroll work railing for it so that will dress it up.  I had carefully dry fit it together, sanding and whittling down the spindle posts that were too fat to fit thru the appropriate holes, and positioned it in the house and it was perfect!  So I disassembled the dry fit and broke out the glue!

Moving right along!

With a cozy fire crackling and kids playing their newest favorite card game (Exploding Kittens), I glued the staircase together in less than an hour!  And put it in the house to make sure the top step reached the floor of the second level library:

No, no, no, no, NO!

To discover that I had assembled the darn thing reversed!  It needs to spiral the opposite way so the top step rests where the black arrow is in the photo, not where it currently is!  When I disassembled the dry fit I must have put the pieces upside down and when I picked them back up to add glue, it changed the direction of the spiral!  Craptastic.

Luckily, our cozy fire in the other room had the house at a lovely 76-degrees (F) so the glue was not set yet.  I could wiggle the parts all back off!  After some sanding of dried glue bits and gluing 2 broken steps back together, I was ready to begin again . . .

Round 2: Murphy's Law - 1; Me - 0.

Spiraling the correct way now...

YAY!  I did it correctly this time!

Now to add my pretty scroll work railing!  However, I didn't like the fork-y looking sticks that came with Alessio's stair kit.  At first I was thinking they would offer support for my pretty scroll work curved railing.  But when I held the curved railing up to the sticks, the sticks disrupted the scroll design.  So I had to cut all the sticks off the stairs...

Sticks all trimmed off

Dry fit of scroll work railing

The railing would be glued to the very edge of the steps and to small balusters at the top and bottom of the steps.  Luckily the laser cut scroll work railing had been wrapped around a mailing tube for months now so the warped curve is pretty much set in place!

Set in to the room - it's a good fit!

Now it was ready for paint!

Painted and with all railing in

More Railing

I have to still do the lower ceiling and add crown moulding, baseboards, and trims so I did not glue the railings or stairs in place (they are just held temporarily with FunTak).  And that is why the fireplace and other bookshelf are missing from the back wall on the first floor: can't work on the ceiling with those in there.  But the Mansion's 2-story Library is just about complete!  Another snow storm that keeps me home for almost a week would do it (Can you hear me, Mother Nature?).