On the Nose

The rounded edge at the top of the stairs is called a nosing.  In our case, it runs along the hallway and the top of the steps.  They are shockingly expensive. We ordered ours from the place where we ordered the stair treads.  I’ll talk more about the stair treads in another post, but the nosings required a lot of work to prepare for installation.  

There were three pieces, two for the long stretch and one for the top step and an angle back.  First we cut and joined all the pieces together using biscuits and glue. Anybody watch the New Yankee Workshop? If you do, you totally know about biscuits.  If not, go look it up.  We arranged the seams to fall where newel posts will go to decrease the noticeability of the seams.  Because of the “Z” shape of the final piece, we needed to miter the boards to fit together for the 90deg angles.  It is so tricky to get this right.  We recommend a more expensive compound miter saw than the one we have.  Nonetheless, we managed pretty well.  Shawn put together a jig to help get everything glued at exactly the right angle. A right angle to be precise.  Hahaha. Next, we’ll finish it and install it. 

To finish it, we used Osmo floor finisher.  It was recommended by our local specialty lumber yard and is apparently what is used on the floor in the Oslo, Norway airport.  So it’s durable for high traffic areas.  Our house doesn’t get international airport levels of traffic so we’re probably good. A few thin coats of the clear satin and it matches the flooring quite well.

To install it, we decided to glue it in place so that we can avoid nailing through the face of it. This turned out to be tricker than you might expect though because we needed a way to hold it both down and against the rest of the floor boards so that it would set in tight.  To apply pressure from the foyer side, we screwed in a couple of 2×4’s against the edge (as you can see in the picture) and used shims to apply pressure.  Extra work? Yes. No nail holes from face nailing? Beautiful.