July 1, 2008
a new old-fashioned handrail
4 Comments »
We put in a handrail at the front steps because the city said that we had to. It took us 2 tries to get it right.
We wanted to put in a good, solid, old-fashioned plumbing pipe handrail. A lot of the houses that have been continually occupied on our neighborhood have them, and they’re classic in a no-nonsense kind of way.
This seemed like it’d be simple, but there was one problem (which had an easy solution). The first version of this was built to rise at a 45 degree angle, but that ended up being too steep of an incline. The top of the handrail was at a ridiculous height and at the bottom it was too low. We were stuck, because we’d used connectors in the available angles and could not see a way to adjust the angles away from the available 45, 90, and 135 degrees.
While walking around Portland, though, we ran across a working version of what we wanted to build. Simple! Genius!
the handrail looks great! i like the liriope placement too.
[...] the city got on us for a few of our myriad code violations. We got caught having peeling paint, no handrail, a broken fence out back, and crumbly steps. We were able to take of the first 3 last summer, but [...]
Funny, I have this handrail in my “servant’s stairs” (which would now be me) in the back of the house! I also just found a bunch of it in our tin shed (and I use the term lightly) which hasn’t been cleaned out in about 90 years. Works great and if you fall down the stairs pregnant (which I did) will have no problem supporting you when you grab on to it for dear life!!!
oh, yea…. the city of Portsmouth VA loves us too! Pretty sad when you are on a first name basis with the code officer.