Railings pt. 2
Again, I'm calling this post pt. 2, but as we've already discussed, I think this should really be pts. 3 & 4 (possibly even 5?). Meh, whatever, it's done, so does it really matter how long it took... (two weeks, if anyone out there is counting).
Anyway, when we last left our heroes, they had successfully installed the anchors that would hold the posts that would hold the railings. The next step was to attach special L brackets to the house where we wanted to put the railings. This turned out to be a bit more tricky than we had guessed.
Last time we installed a railing, we did so on a brick-exterior house. So installing the L brackets was as simple as drilling into the brick and screwing the brackets into place. Okay, so it was a good work-out, but it wasn't difficult. This time we were attaching the railings to a house with vinyl siding with squishy squishy foam underneath. The problem? If we attached the brackets and tried to tighten them up, we would crush the siding. Not so good.
The solution? Ask at the local mom-and-pop hardware store. The guy gave us a look for about 0.5 seconds, and then took us to the right aisle to find these little plastic plugs that were exactly what we needed. (If you have a little mom-and-pop hardware store in your area, I highly recommend going there for questions like these. Don't get me wrong, I do love my big-box stores, but I feel like they're mostly for when I already know what item I need to get. If I want to ask what type of item I need for a particular project, I have much better luck at the little local places).
After our trip to the hardware store, we headed back to the house and drilled some large holes in the siding that we fitted our little plasticy plugs into.
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| This will give us something to tighten against, so that we don't squish the siding. |
Once that was done, we could actually go ahead and instal the L brackets! Finally! This was taking a lot longer than I had expected, and at this point we had already been working on this easy afternoon project for a couple of days. I'm writing this up fairly well after the fact, so I don't actually remember how long this took us, but I think it was at least three days total.
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| The bracket that we will eventually attach the railings to! |
Now that we'd installed the anchors and the brackets, it was finally time to put in the damned railings! Huzzah! That part actually went fairly quickly, and I'm sorry to say that I don't really have any pictures of it. It was late in the day, and I was tired, and I just wanted to be done with the damned thing, so I didn't take as many pictures as I usually do. Sorry. My bad. Here's one shot of the first part of the last railing. Yeah, think about that.
You can see both of the columns, plus the brackets attached to the house, if you look really closely. At this point, we realized that it was like, 4pm and hot out, and we hadn't had any lunch yet. So we took a break to go get some fries, and came back to install the very last piece of railing.
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| Here it is, finally finished! |
As a bonus, in this last picture you can see the sorry state of our front garden beds, which are, indecently, our next project! So, I think that's going to be it for right now. I know that I took a long time to write this blog post, and as a result, I probably forgot some important details of the project (which has been done for about 2 weeks at this point). We're currently working on those garden beds, and I'm going to try to write up my posts about those a little more often, so that I can give you guys all of the really boring details you love!
Stay tuned for more "DIY Summer 2015"!
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