My wife and I like to improve things- we are constantly working to change things and make them better. We have become pros at tearing our houses apart, to put them back together in a better, more beautiful (hopefully) and useful way. Our last house was a small 2 bedroom, 1 bath house. We turned it into a much more useful 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, expanded the laundry area, and added a pantry. It required moving some things around, replacing all the plumbing, and fixing many electrical issues as well. It was a lot of work, but well worth it in the end.
In our new home, we have found we are doing the same thing: changing things to make them more useful to us. Our plans include repainting, updating the trim work, and changing some of the lighting. We’ve ripped out a bunch of bushes already, and we’re looking forward to spring to plant some more, and get our vegetable garden going. Our current project, though, is updating the stair rails.
While the current rails are usable, they looked like they were from 1979, and were far enough apart the two youngest kids could fit through them with ease. Hopefully they are smart enough not to try to climb on the outside of the railing… but if they are anything like me…
So I ripped out the old railing and banisters, to install an upgraded railing and iron banisters, which look nicer. I’m also using the opportunity to refinish the wood- it being a little older than myself, the finish is wearing off in places and it is scratched and dented. The color is also a bit too… brown, so we are changing it to more of a cherry coloring.
Anyway, part of the challenge of the new banisters is getting them all to be evenly spaced. unlike the old ones, I want them to be up to code, meaning no more than 4 inches apart. And because they are iron, they’re not held in place with nails, like the old ones.
As I’ve been slowly working on the project, I found a trick of marking a piece of wood with the appropriate distance between holes, to help speed up measuring. I’m not very good at it, and for some reason the math never seems to work quite right in getting the right distance between marks, so there is a little bit of trial and error involved.
I had an interesting thing happen while working on one of the railings, the longest one up to that point. As I was marking, I had two marks on my measuring stick that were almost identical.
Looking at the two marks, they look almost the same. And when I started to mark the wood I was going to drill, the lines were almost identical.
But look what happened by the end of the railing:
There is almost an inch in difference! That is after only 5 feet. The thought, and the lesson I gleaned from this project is that it only takes a very small difference at the beginning to have a huge impact just a little down the road. Imagine if this was a long road, an airplane course, or a space shuttle launch. Just a little bit, less than a millimeter, has huge ramifications later down the road.
Fortunately, I was able to correct the mistake, and so far the railings are looking pretty good. I’m still trying to figure out the actual stairs rails- throwing in that 37 degree angle messes everything up! And in my own life, I know I have the opportunity to change, to repent, and to correct past mistakes. It’s not always as easy as using an eraser, and is often far more painful than getting a few splinters or some dust in my eyes, but it is possible. And the finished project is hopefully far more beautiful and useful than the original.
DaveGrigsby.com 