Overhead view of the balcony railing

December 16, 2012
252 views
View otterine's images

I've seen a few treatments for joining a stair railing to a balcony railing. The easiest by far is the double newel post option, but the way the room is set up they would have to be literally side by side with no gap between them. Not the most appealing aesthetic.

My Dremel savvy friend and I were talking about this yesterday, and he had a brilliant solution: offset the newel posts and have a small angled section of railing between them. This makes perfect visual sense and it also eliminates having to navigate around a harsh corner on the way to the bathroom. Genius!

There was a gap between the foyer paper and the hallway paper. I cut a scrap of basswood to hide this area and painted it Vintage White to match the trim. All of the spindles have pins in the bottoms and are glued in place in addition to having the pin supports.

I cut a piece of railing with 45° cuts at either end to join the newel post at the top of the stairs with that of the balcony. Took me three times to get this to work, and it's still not the cleanest cut. I also had to shave off a little from bottom of the stair newel post since the staircase extended above the hallway flooring. I needed the two newel post tops to match relative to one another.

Once I had it all in place, I touched up the stain on the railing. The angle join could be cleaner but with the stain touch-up and the low light in the hallway, the minor gap isn't really noticeable. Overall, this part of the project was about as difficult as I thought it would be and turned out about as well as I had hoped. Definitely a success all around.