Remember the couple who decided to go with oak instead of blue-stain pine for their stairs and floors?
Well, the same couple did want to use beetle-kill wood for the handrail and bannister on their stairs. In fact, they wanted the whole thing built out of peeled beetle-kill logs, to add a rustic flair to their new house.
So we hand-peeled the logs with a drawknife and gave everything time to dry out. Then we carefully carved pegs and cut holes in order to fit everything together mortis-and-tenon style.
The handrail turned out to be the hardest part: we couldn’t find one log long enough to span the entire wall. (To meet Lake County’s building codes, handrails can’t have breaks in them.) So we found 2 logs the same size and joined them using a sturdy peg. Then we mounted the whole thing to the wall with metal hardware that supported the joint.
