Hardwood Floors Part 5: Finishing the Stairway

Covering the longer flight of stairs that leads to the hallway upstairs took a while to complete, but I have now put down the last plank of flooring and all this project lacks are some trim pieces.  The stairs appeared to be a repetitive process at the outset, but I ran into a few interesting snags along the way.

To clad the riser involved this 3-step process:

Remove carpet and sand	Spacer brings riser flush w/ nose	Cut and glue Hardwood to riser

To cover the stair tread, I decided to scribe and round off the bullnose to leave a clean edge exposed.  Then I just had to select planks for the remainder of the tread, mitre them to fit against the molding, glue and weight down overnight.  Detail of bullnose scribed to fit under molding:

It turned out that one of the pieces of bullnose was warped widthwise so that it would not mate flush with the adjacent plank.
Rather than try to apply enough pressure to straighten it while being glued, I built a jig to run it through the table saw and put a straight edge on it.  I then had to rabbet the underside to accept the tongue of the adjacent plank.

Halfway done

Another piece of bullnose had a crack along its grain that I had to glue

The completed stairway: