Hi Brendan,
From the outset, let me start by saying, I’m loving my new staircase and landing. I did however have a couple of issues I had to overcome when putting the kit together.
Firstly, I believe I received posts P1 and P2 in a configuration suited for the left hand side of the stairs and not the right as I had ordered, and unfortunately I didn’t realise this until after I had installed the two P3 posts and the horizontal rails R5, R6 and R7. After a bit of swearing and carrying on, I realised I could get around this by rotating the bottom mounting fixture of posts P1 and P2 180 degrees so that they were now suitable for the right side of the stairs. This however meant the grub screws on posts P1 and P2 were now on the inside of the railings, whilst the grub screws on both P3 posts were still on the outside. Being a stickler for consistency, this left me with no choice but to also rotate the bottom mounting fixtures of the P3 posts 180 degrees so that all of the grub screws would be on the inside of the railings. Once I had all the pieces configured correctly, it still took me a lot of tightening, loosening and tightening again of the grub screw to eventually get the balustrade squared off horizontally and vertically. If there’s a trick to doing this, I think it would have been useful to have it in the assembly instructions. Actually, including any instructions for assembling the balustrades would have been useful.
The other issue I experienced was in securing the checker plate to the landing. After snapping or burning a number of drill bits in an effort to drill holes of the right size for the nosing screws, I eventually ended up drilling the holes too big, resulting in another round of swearing and carrying on, followed closely by a trip to Bunnings for some bigger screws (turns out nobody else around here stocks 12G nosing screws). I would have appreciated something in the instructions, or even on the packet of screws, that told me what size hole I needed. Better still, if the holes were pre-drilled, it might have saved me a handful of drill bits, and a whole lot of angst.
But like I said from the outset, I’m still loving my new staircase and landing……
For your viewing pleasure, I have attached several photos of the finished product installed. You may notice it’s not bolted down just yet. That’ll happen after I finish rendering the walls.
