A year or two ago, suffering from terrible decor overload, I tore out the gaudy beige and gold twisted, scrolling picket staircase railing which adorned our main stairway. Since then I searched and searched for a modern replacement to take some focus away from some other design remnants left over from the previous owners (ehm, terrible tiles). The problem ended up being that there aren’t many railing options for closed box staircases, and fewer DIY modern indoor railing product. Like many industries the railing/stair manufactures don’t cater to the public, products are intended for contractors. With my wife newly pregnant it was time to kick this railing project into overdrive and get it done, after much searching and planning I found and installed a solution that worked out great.

For those of you wondering a box, or closed box, staircase is a staircase where the stringers (the support boards on either side of the stairway) enclose the stairs. In some cases stairways enclosed by walls are referred to by the same name, this is not the case here. If the one or both of the stringers do not enclose the stairs, but leave them open to extend past the stringer, the stairway is known as open, or partially open at least.

Railings on closed box staircases are, in most cases, mounted to the angled top edge of one or both stringers or affixed to the outside of the stringer. In the case of mounting the posts on the stringer the base of the pickets, or posts, can only be as wide as the width of the stringer, which can be quite restrictive.

In our case the stringer was under 2″ wide, not wide enough for most posts, and because of the 2nd floor landing spacing there was no room to affix posts to the outside of stringer. These issues left us very few options, even fewer modern design options. A modern-style steel railing needs something in the neighbourhood of a 3″ square base for each post, many require a flat surface as well, our stringer has neither. Mounting the posts on the stair tread, on the inside the stringer would result in a very awkward looking staircase and eliminate 3″ of stair width — so no help there.

The solution I came up with was to cut hardwood blocks to bolt to the inside of the stringer to add additional width to the stringer where support the posts was needed. It worked like a charm, painting the risers white along with the wood blocks gave the staircase a farm house look.

The railing hardware is from Inline Design, who offer some fantastic designs and will customize hardware to suit your needs at no extra cost — which you will need if any posts are mounted on either landing as well as the stringer since they will need to be difference heights to maintain the proper handrail (and potentially cable) angle. Thankfully, Inline Design has very reasonable shipping rates to Canada and the U.S., though some custom charges do apply. The hallelujah component from Inline Design is a pivoting base for their posts, this allows mounting the post to a stringer, or any angled surface as long as it has at least 3″ square available. All in all this project came in at about half the cost of having a contractor do it — and I’m not sure any local companies would have offered the blocking solution I ended up with. I’m almost certain I would’ve been told the entire staircase would have to be redone in order to install this type of railing.

The above step-by-step gallery should give a pretty clear picture as to how this all worked, feel free to ask questions in the comments.