painting staircase spindles

Do a Barry Bucknell. Panel them in with hardboard then paint the hardboard with a roller.

In a previous house, I had to take one spindle out to get a wood turner to copy for replacements for three broken ones. They were only held in by one nail at each top and bottom. When I discovered how easy they were to remove, I took them all out and painted them on the workbench. The nail holes needed retouching later, but it was much easier than painting in situ. As it was a stair in a house with 10ft ceilings, plus railings around the side and end of the stairwell on the upper landing, there were a lot of them to paint. The newel posts were all that were needed to support the handrails.

On an ancillary point. Some houses in part of this borough seem to have pick axe handles used as spindles. Maybe at one time there was a glut of these? Mine however are square, and you get a kind of thickening at the corners when you paint them. Some time ago I had cause to remove all paint from a damaged one and was surprised to note that it had some kind of lacquer or varnish applied to the wood. One of the problems in this house is knocks and chips in the wood around doors, and parts of the banister and bigger timbers at the top etc, probably done when moving furniture at some point in the past. Its hard to fill such things and paint them so they actually last I find. Brian

Yes and there are several houses in this road with this done, but to me it seems a shame to cover them up.

There used to be some kind of hardboard with a plastic finish people used for this very task, looks a bit naff now, but I suppose its all down to fashion at the time. Door handles is another case where there have been several fads over the years. Brian

Grandparents used to own a fantastic big house in Epsom that they bought either just before or after WW2 after renting it for a while.

Once their three kids had flown the nest they took in lodgers but the local council made them fit automatic door closers and make the internal doors fireproof by screwing a sheet of asbestos-cement on both sides of every door and painting with eggshell paint.

Those were the days.

Grandma died in 1993 and builder living next door bought it for £120K, now worth at least a million I guess, but he had to spend a lot on refurbs and extending the rear.

Andrew

When I first moved in to this house all the hallway wood was a dark brown and with dark red wallpaper. A truly gloomy part of the house.

I stripped all the wood and it had a tar like lacquer that was a right pain to remove. It was "suggested" that the stair spindles and banister rail would look good stripped back to the bare wood because "they would have used decent materials back in 1908". There was good reason everything was covered in a dark brown tar like substance. Although the stair spindles are fairly ornate, each having turned sections and with square sections top, middle and bottom, the quality of the wood was not that good. The stripped spindles didn't match each other in colour and the whole assembly had been put together with large cut nails and the holes filled with a putty like filler. It was immediately painted white :)