The Architect's Loft & Circular Staircase

Prior to the pandemic, I was excited that my friend, Lisa, and I could get together and work on a few projects together now that she was living in the city.  Originally I thought we would just work on our own individual projects, but Lisa wanted us to work on the same project and each take our own spin on the room box.  

I still had a Loft kit that had been a workshop at a Camp Mini Ha Ha, that I hadn't gotten to attend in person.  We weren't able to buy a second complete kit for Lisa, but we were able to buy all the components so we decided to make this our team project.  

But first we had to cut the walls for Lisa's Loft.  It was made from 3/16" Gatorboard, which was a challenge to cut on my small Micro Mark saw, but we managed.  We used my kit as the template.

We both had different ideas on how we wanted to install the windows in the loft.  Lisa wanted to separate her windows and I wanted to keep mine in one large unit.

We also flipped the layout of the projects.  Lisa had her complete wall of the right.

And although this picture shows my wall on the right, I ended up putting it on the left side.

This was our first look at the overall shape and size of the project.

I'm making mine as an Architect's Loft and Lisa is making hers as a Pottery Studio.

The loft has a second floor and I've heard that everyone who had completed the project at camp had avoided the circular staircase to the second floor because of it's challenges, so I thought it was a good to get the worst thing over right from the beginning.  The circular staircase is built from a wooden fan, two fans actually to get to the next floor.  

So our next step was to dismantle the fans and size up where we could make the cuts to get the correct size tread and correct piece for the side of the riser.

The treads and side pieces are cut from the fan but the riser is made from a piece of basswood.  We use two fan blades per each treads because the vanes are very thin.  Even then, we found the hole that we needed to support the dowel wasn't secure enough, so we added a small round wood disc in this area on the underside to reinforce each step.  Here's a shot of the tread upside down to see where we added the wood disc and you get a better view of the riser we cut.

Each tread had to be threaded on a wooden dowel as shown in this picture.

We still have to work out how to add spindles and handrail.  Turning a handrail on a curve will be challenging to do in wood.  Check back in a future blog post to see how we handled making the handrail and spindles.  In the meanwhile, here's a peak at something that played a big part in this next step.  You'll also see a picture that became the inspiration for our finish on the staircase.

Although the staircase was a challenging part of this project, the brick work was definitely the most time consuming and tedious.  What we thought was going to be a project that may take a couple of months to complete, (okay Lisa thought it was going to be completed in a few weeks) thanks to a pandemic turned into a two year project.  

The lighting also turned out to be a challenge, but finding tools to help with the lighting actually solved the challenge of the curved handrail.

So I'm leaving you with lots of teasers that you'll have to wait until the next post to find out about.

Hope you're following along!  Next time we'll be working along to Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall song, just to keep us motivated.  

Until the next time.....

Wanda