a new old-fashioned handrail

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!