How To Install Iron Balusters

hi i'm shannon from houseimprovements.com and in today's video i just want to show you how easy it is for you to install these metal balusters to your railing we've got a couple other videos that'll show you how we installed the posts and the handrails and the bottom shoe mold this video here will solely focus on the balusters so i hope you enjoy it and if you do click the thumbs up let's take a look okay so our uh kind of our pattern we're gonna have is we're gonna have one of these um double style balusters like that and then we're gonna have two singles on each side of it sort of thing and it'll just continue on like that so there'll be two here two over on that side so it's a little bit more messing around to figure out than if i just had all these the same style but not really a huge deal so normally if you had all the same style what you don't want to have is uh more than four inches between them by code so generally you're shooting for four inches center to center or less and you want to try to get them to balance out so it looks proper now getting it to balance out so your end spaces are similar to what your your spaces in here are is a lot easier when you're when you're using all the same type of baluster so in our case we it's going to be a little bit off but it's going to be real close and it's just because it's hard to make it work when you've got this other style thrown in the mix so basically what you want to start out by doing is measuring the total width you have and dividing it by the the spacing that you'd like to go for so i usually just use four as my number and from from there you'll you'll be able to determine if uh like how many space you're gonna have and let's let's just say you've got uh well let's let's just do this one if we were going to use all the same balusters this is 44 inches and if it if we're going to use 4 we divide that by 44 as 11 spaces okay so usually what i would do because this one happened to work out exact it wouldn't matter but let's just say it worked out to uh 11 and 11.6 spaces so we'd round that up to 12. so then you take your 44 divided by 12. i don't know whatever the math is for that like three and a half let's just say probably three and three quarters that would be the space centered center that you would use okay i can't really do that system because of the way these these work out so i've already kind of pre-figured it out and i know that i'm going to measure from the center of these ones i wanted to shoot for about six inches to the center of this next single beside it so in the end anyways what i ended up coming out with is uh basically six inches worked out between between this wide one and the single and four and an eighth were or four sorry inches worked out on the little ones in my situation everyone's going to be different depending on the space you have there and the type of rail you're using but anyway so you've got us you've got to figure out your spacing and to get it all marked out here at the bottom now with these ones because they screw on i also made up some temp some templates that i can put along here and pre-drill my screw holes once i have the once i have the locations figured out if you have this type of railing or this type of baluster it doesn't have the screw-on spindles it's just the rod you're likely going to have either a groove in here that they'll slide into and little fillet wooden pieces will fit between or you might have holes that you've got to drill and you pop these all together like i said with mine it screws so we've got to kind of lay it all out before we can put them in place i like to put some tape on here just because it's easier to write on and peel off if you screw something up it's just easier to see so in in my layout on this side i basically have uh like i said i've got marked out here on the floor ahead of time but my first small baluster is going to be right there okay so i'm going to have two smalls a large on each side and then two smalls again on this short section okay so i know i've got one there i'm going to mark this out with my tape for all the spaces that i had and then i can go along with my jig you'll see and mark it all out uh just take me a minute to mark this out i don't know if that's wrong it's easy to get mixed up on this so especially when you've got two different things going on and that'll be the six inch yeah because uh this one here is going to be the big big baluster the double wide one and this was going to be the big one ah geez i keep messing up [Music] yeah so i got two bigs on this side and yeah six small guys so just about got it okay so i'll just square these off and i put that tape about in the middle of the width of my post because i know that i'm going to have the balusters centered on the post with because the handrail and everything's centered on that so this bottom shoe holding is wider obviously you can see so i can't center the balusters on it okay so like i said this location in this location are going to be the double wide guys these ones those are going to be there and all the other locations are going to be the the singles so i've got two different templates and uh this one here yeah this one here is gonna be this one so like i said i just want to go along and pre-drill all my holes because it's going to make it easier to drive in these little wee screws that they give with it if i have it pre-drilled and i'm not just trying to drive those into the wood so now that i've got my spacing all lined up i just should just double check that the end here is these two are equal yeah so it should all look reasonably equal when i'm done okay so i'll pre-drill my holes okay so that has the bottom done which will make it a lot easier to get my screws started now for the top i should put some tape on it the underside of the handrail so i can mark on that i need to plumb up one of these locations so i can transfer that up here should be right there my eyes are getting old okay so that was this one so those are my two singles so now i just gotta do the same thing again across the top mark out my locations and use my other jig and pre-drill the holes so i'll do that here quickly it's really more about figuring out your layout and getting him marked out and ready than it is anything okay so i want to use this jig now and the only reason i've got to change jigs is because my hand rail like you can see on this side is set in it's not flush to the outside of the post like this is down here so the way my jig was set up is that i'm running along here and setting my distance inward so i've got to make a little shorter a little narrower jig in order to do that for up here that's all so i'll drill these out and then we'll be ready to start putting some in so i've got those all drilled i can pull that tape off now [Music] so any luck at all these fit between here [Applause] get it lined up roughly in the right location now i would also normally stain this all before i put these in so i'll probably be removing these after we do the video so that it can get stained but we need to figure out a stain color first and i wanted to shoot the video while we were doing all the rest today so so simply just put the screws in nothing to it okay so i'm just going to continue on doing that all the way along also one thing i wanted to do because of the style of these these screw down balusters and they've got the big foot on the bottom in an earlier video where you can see me build the railings and everything i mentioned that i want to put a couple screws into the through this into the floor and that will be good because i can actually hide it underneath the foot of this all i don't have the screws sitting here with me and like i said i'm going to pull these out after any ways to do the staining but i'll just remember to drill in a couple spots along the bottom plate here you might have even seen it moving here a little bit because i've only got it brad nailed in place just to keep it in position so i'll just now you can't always do that but if you if you had a dado down here and didn't have these screw on plates you could hide the screws in there as well so with this one i'm too much talking not enough thinking let's put the right one in the right spot here i okay have opened all these screws ahead of time anyways i'm going to go ahead and get these all in and it's really just as easy as what you're seeing me do here two two [Music] so [Music] okay so uh it really is just as easy as that there's not a whole lot to it um even with the ones that don't screw in it's it's really not a whole lot different and sometime if i get a chance to do one of them i will post a video on that style as well you might have noticed i didn't put all the screws in because like i said i'm going to be taking these out to do the staining but i wanted to give you the right effect of what's going on here so you can see we don't want to have four inches in between them so we're just just borderline on on what is allowed so worked out just right so um it's a little different pattern it's kind of nice when they they mix up the different styles there's tons and tons of different styles of them and this kind of all works nice with the straight lines and and styling that's going on in this renovation so hopefully that uh gave you some insight on you know how to install these or something similar and between the video showing how to install these newer posts and install all the railings and everything and now the balusters you should be able to do your own railings all right well i appreciate that you watched smash that thumbs up button and subscribe to the channel and as usual we'll have links in the in the description uh we'll probably through maybe even throw these balusters in the description for links and uh facebook patreon those sorts of things that we always have in there thanks a lot for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 12,180

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: DIY, how to, renovate, house, improvements, stairs, balcony, stairwell, replace, fix, how, to, railing, ballister, metal, spindles, rail, safe, steel, banister, custom, install, ballusters, baluster, staircase, iron

Id: YTFpLYgQE_E

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021