Railings (Day 1)

Well, I had the house to myself this weekend while my wife headed up to pick up our son from camp. One of the projects I agreed to tackle while she was gone was the front porch railings. We've been talking about them for a while, but time and logistics kept getting in the way. With the 4th of July giving us a 3 day weekend this year, things sort of came together.

I pulled out my tools, and tracked down the power drill

I didn't have my power saw, so I it was a lot of hand cuts with my crosscut saw. Fortunately the wood was pine, so wasn't like trying to saw through  hardwood.

 It was a lot of cutting, let me tell you.

I didn't want to risk splitting the wood, so I took the time to pre-drill all my screw-holes.

Part of the problem we were having was that the pre-fab railing at Lowes were not long enough to reach between the columns we were building this around. In order to remedy this, I built boxes to fill in the gaps. The top here is just over a foot across.

 This gives you a good idea of the layout. I wasn't ready to mount it to the column just yet today. Still need to bracket it all together and such. But it was good to get the major components built and fitted.