Construction Techniques for a Hardwood Staircase

Hardwood Basics

• Hardwood comes from deciduous trees, or those that lose their leaves annually. Types of hardwood include oak, walnut, birch, poplar, ash and cherry. Lumberyards and other vendors sell hardwood in rough form, cut by the foot to thickness measured in quarter-inch increments. For instance, a 4/4 board of hardwood is 1 inch thick, because it contains four quarter-inch units.

  Always design your staircase before you purchase your hardwood, so you know how much of it you need, in what size and thickness.

Designing a Wood Staircase

• Designing a staircase begins with measuring the rise, or height from bottom to top of the staircase. Check local building codes to find the maximum height for an individual stair, and divide the rise by this number to get the minimum number of individual stairs you need. Also find the minimum width of each stair from your local building codes, which helps determine the length of your staircase. Once you know the length and height, create a scale drawing to determine how much wood you need.

Preparing Hardwood

• Preparing wood entails cutting it to the right length and finishing the surface for suitable use in a domestic setting. Cutting hardwood requires very sharp tools, due to the hardness of the wood. You can use a circular power saw for this. The “Black & Decker Complete Guide to Outdoor Wood Projects” recommends using a mounted circular power saw for cutting hardwood, which exerts greater force than a hand-operated saw.

  Because you purchase hardwood in unfinished form, you must finish it. You can pay the lumberyard to do this for you or use a planer designed for use with hardwood.

Building the Staircase

• Building a staircase requires little more than affixing all of your cut, finished pieces of wood together. Start this process by drilling or nailing the diagonal frame elements, the stringers to the landing at the top and bottom of the staircase. To drill or nail hardwood, you need hard tools like a carbide-tipped drill or a powerful pneumatic nail gun. When renting or purchasing a nail gun or drill tip for hardwood use, always tell the salesperson what you need the tool for. If you plan on nailing your staircase by hand, you need a drill to create pilot holes into which you drive nails – hardwood is too hard to nail by hand without assistance. Once the diagonal frame pieces are in place, simply nail down your boards to create the surface and backing of each stair.