railing for concrete steps

Have a flight of 10 concrete steps in the back of the house where wife wants a wrought iron railing. First call she made got a quote of $100/foot or $1,000 installed for powder coated wrought iron. Seems outrageous to me. Any ideas how to proceed? How hard would it be to buy a rail and put it in myself?

Reply to
Frank
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We'd have to discuss, masonary versus hammer drill bits. But after that, not too bad.

Thousand bucks sounds like a lot of money. For that scratch, you could drive to Lowe's, Home Depot, Ace, and your small town hardware, and get some great advice. And some companies that do this kind of thing.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

I did make an HD trip but they had no advice and no stock rails. Good idea to go to local Ace store as they are good on advice. Rail is superfluous to me but wife's knees are shot and she wants it.

BTW one of the kids had given me a $25 gift card for HD and I bought a 3 C cell 230 lumen LED light with it ($24.97). Light has rubber bumpers front and rear and will take a drop and keep working.

Reply to
Frank

hI, I have only 5 step filight from backl sunroom down to patio. I installed Al railing in white color my self anchoring it to patio concrete floor and sunroom wall. Total cost was 40.00 or so.

Reply to
Tony Hwang

Frank , depending on how fancy it is that may not be a bad price . If it's just 1/2" square pickets and plain top/bottom rails that's kinda high . Do you have metalworking skills and the tooling to do this ? Do you have experience in calculating pitch , picket length , cut angles , etc ? Though

7 1/2" rise 11 1/2" run is fairly common , your steps may have a different pitch ...
Reply to
Terry Coombs

No, don't have the heavy tools and now in my mid-70's don't do things the way I did in the past.

Reply to
Frank

You will have to make up a to-scale side view of the house, stairs and landing area at the bottom. Then draw in the railing, and you can determine how long the railings will have to be.

In my local Menards Hardware they sell railing by the foot, you buy the top rail, the bottom rail, and the number of uprights you need. There are endcaps/filials that finish off both ends of the railing.

Embedding the top and bottom end posts into the concrete will require drilling holes in the concrete and that will take a considerable amount of time and energy. The top and bottom rails can also fasten to the house itself for added rigidity.

A lot of work, but $1000 seems high. If you go that route, get reference names and addresses of previous work and check them out.

Take a tour around your town/city, see how other similar railings are installed, take pictures.

Reply to
hrhofmann

There are rails that you can assemble yourself and install yourself. You can get wood, aluminum, assorted plastics. Depends on what you want the end result to be.

The $1000 price sounds about right for a top quality powder coated iron rail. They are hand made to order and take a lot of time to weld up. Front of house, that would be my choice. back of house, maybe. Too many variables to say what is right for you.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

Saw some kits on line but wanting 10 feet would require special order. Could handle the minor metal drilling but would probably need a better drill for the concrete. Back of house does not have to be fancy which was probably the $1,000 quote. Still a work in progress and I appreciate ideas gathered here.

These are the steps:

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Reply to
Frank

Do they have to BE wrought iron, or just look like it? About 5 yr ago I was selling my old row house and discovered that I had some old rusted wrought iron columns holding up an aluminum awning on the back porch and a length of wrought iron railings that had rusted out in the front (about 4 steps worth). I got a quote form a real wrought iron company and it was something like 1500 which at that point was more than I wanted to put into the house. I ended up calling a local aluminum awning company and it turns out that they did make replacement columns. So on a whim, I asked if they knew anything about railings and they said that they could do that as well, although it wasn't one of their advertised services. Altogether, the work turned out to be 1/3 of what the other company quoted. And the railings actually look pretty close to the originals. They didn't have all the twisty wrought iron stuff, but it worked fine. You may want to look into that approach, esp since this is in the back of your house.

Reply to
Lee B

The railing lower end could be secured to the white-washed wall and to the house at the top, for well under $100.00 if you could talk your wife into a n ordinary wood railing. Tell her how many times you could eat out with th e $900+ you would be saving and maybe she'll come around to a simplified wa y of thinking about a railing.

Those stairs do look like they need some sort of a railing though.

Reply to
hrhofmann

Don't lose track of the most important thing, that the railing is sturdy and that it's grippable, by both of you.

I've seen kits for eithe iron railings or steel railings that look like wrought iron. I like old stuff too, on principle, but iiuc, the only reason wrought iron is traditional is that it could be worked locally and steel railings were too hard to make in those years.

The only hard part is drilling the holes, maybe 4 of them or 6, top and bottom and every 2 or 3 steps. I don't think this is beyond you. Even after the thread on hammer drill bits versus masonry bits, I'm not sure what it would take to drill into your concrete steps, but if needed, even a cheap harbor freight hammer drill will do 6 holes. I think. (So far I've only drilled into mortar between bricks, so what do I know.)

My google is not working now so I can't look for kits and I can read more about drilling in concrete.

Reply to
micky

On Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:59:11 -0400, Frank wrote in

Tell her to forget metal and just do a 2x4 hand rail on 3 or 4 vertical 4x4 posts set in concrete.

Reply to
VinnyB

Harbor freight has hammer drills for about $32. I have one, works fine for drilling holes in concrete. If you have to chip out an area, they have hammer drills that include just hammer for about $90 that take chisels too; alternatively, drill holes then use a hand chisel and hammer.

Reply to
dadiOH

Good to know. I usually avoid HF but one shot item would be OK.

Reply to
Frank

That was amongst the kits I saw at one site but you had to contact them on all rails above 8.5 feet.

Reply to
Frank

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