Or how I spend the past two weeks....

Alright, so a few months ago I painted the hallways and took the old handrail down, which you can see a picture of here. There was nothing special about it, just your old generic 12' section of premade handrail. Which I figured I could improve upon myself easily.

So we began the hunt, looking a different types at Home Depot, Lowe's, even Menard's. We finally ended up liking the oak handrail offered at Home Depot, but to do what I wanted, I needed a 13' section...which they only carried 12" max. No problem I figured, some dowels, wood glue, and some nails will be good enough. Boy was I wrong....

Moving on though, we bought two 8' lengths ($3.85 per foot), some Minwax Ipswitch stain, and some handrail brackets which look like this actually. Mental note, if you take the wood over to the paint department they usually will let you test it on a bit of it to get a feel for it's look. Pretty nice of them actually. I also watched this video courtesy of This Old House a few times.

So anyways we get home with all our stuff and get a crackin'. After some measurements of the thickness of the handrail bracket and handrail itself (diagonally) I ended up snapping a chalk line around 29 1/4" from the top of the stair thread (which you should be able to see in this picture in particular). Actually putting up the handrail brackets has turned out to be one of the easier tasks once I got that chalk line up. Although sometimes finding a stud in this house is a nightmare, especially when you are trying to maintain a fairly equal distance between them. I've always had a pet peeve when it comes to making sure all 3 screws get sunk firmly into wood, because you always see some lazy builder who only puts two in and they always get wobbly.

After that, I started joining the top angle bits, and actually ended up doing two 20 degree cuts and joining them with good old wood glue and finish nails. I was going to try to do a dowel also, but trust me just nails...of course make sure you predrill the holes, especially when working with oak. Otherwise the nails will just bend as you are trying to countersink them. Here you can see the angle, and the test fit I did after it dried:

Now for the hard part....I had thought I would be able to just join the two pieces of hand rail with a few wood dowels, some glue and maybe some nails. What I've come to terms with is that between my lack of skill, limited tools, and ....well really do I need more than that? Basically anything I tried wouldn't work. Even making jigs/templates out of cardboard always ended up with the holes being off way to much to fix with some sanding. So after much research I decided that my saving grace was a rail bolt kit (turns out they sell them at Lowe's...when I found it I did a happy dance). Now onto the next problem....a 1" spade bit has a 1/4" point on it.....the handrail is only 1 14/" deep...which means by the time I drilled enough space for the rail bolt kit to fit...I'd have poked out the other end. So what I ended up doing was drilling as deep as I could and then using my drill press (thanks honey) to carve out the rest with a regular old spiral bit that just happened to be in it. Took a little while to do but worked great. Of course trying it by hand would be crazy, you need the ability of the drill press to stop the depth. There's a great shot of me halfway through down below.....

Now that the hole was drilled, I needed to drill the one in the end of the handrail for the machine screw end to go in...this is of course a little bigger than it needed to be (1/2" spade)...that's the benefit of rail bolts, you get some wiggle room. So once I have the larger hole drilled I measured up where the wood screw half of the rail bolt should go and pre-drilled that hole as well. Then the next bit is the fun part...put it all together and glue the heck out of it. I had a real dog of a time getting the bolt snug and ended up using needle nose pliers as none of my open ended wrenches would even fit in the 1" hole. Once it was as tight as humanly possible, a ton of wood glue and the oak plug went in:

The next day I came back and began the joy that is sanding. I ended up using a lot of 60 grit for the hard bits and then finishing up with a 100 grit. The oak was so hard that even 60 took a lot of elbow grease to get anything done. The real key here is patience, as I didn't want to risk using a power sander. After sanding is all done the easy parts are next, stain and sand. No real tricks here, just used an old clean t-shirt and a high quality bristle brush for the shellac. After the staining I ended up putting the hand rail up on two screws so I could do the shellac in one whole coat twice, so no lines or anything.

24 hours later (horrible humidity...rained which means it took forever to dry) and we're done. Pre-drilled all the holes and mounted it:

I think it's better than the old one: