What a Victorian staircase should be..
When you first look around a house, there are many things to take in and one of those that might not be at first obvious is how the staircase has been abused over time and how difficult these DIY bodges might be to fix. This is what I wish we knew..
Victorian staircases were often ornate, detailed staircases, with decorative original spindles and newel posts. You may notice that these have been removed (from potential earlier damage, or heaven forbid, fashion sense) however the manner in which this has happened can have a big impact on your options and how you repair what remains.
What it was…
In our case, a homeowner at some point in the past had removed all of the decorative spindles, cut off (badly) the decorative bottom and side pieces on each tred, and inserted cheap and nasty dark painted battons at 90 degrees to cover it all up.
Not only this, they had hacked to pieces the original newel posts at the top of the original first staircase and then boxed these in using flimsy wood to create a solid newel post and intermiediary panel. I had really hoped not to find the originals underneath due to the condition they would now be in, being clearly too low, however this was indeed the case.
Fixing the Problem
- The dimensions of new newel posts in our case had changed slightly from the original dimensions which meant additional difficulty in retro fitting them. You couldn’t just replace them with a better version, like for like.
- There was additional work required on the side of the staircase as the original decoration had been cut away but now the spindles sat into the existing gap and left a strange frontage.
- The staircase also needed to be carpeted due to the small pieces of tread on each step that had been hacked off at an earlier time so a stairrunner was not an option.
Lessons learned
- Check in detail the condition of the staircase when you buy a property as you would be amazed at what some people in history could have done and this will impact your options making it hard to have that beautiful original staircase you wanted.
- Before you repair or replace an original staircase in terms of the newel posts and spindles, or indeed plasterboard the understairs if you are thinking about getting a downstairs WC in there, check that the treads have been repaired / replaced as much as possible as these are then blocked in. We had completed the WC and plasterboarding hence the staircase joinery team could only then repair the treads that remained accessible as this needs to be done from underneath.
We had no idea that the staircase had been so badly mistreated and should you purchase a home with a similar abomination, hopefully the above will help with the amount of work involved and the order in which to proceed to bring it back to life.