How to Make a Porch Rail - DIY Home Improvement Video
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Learn how to build a custom wooden porch railing using stock rails and balusters. Build custom porch railing to add character and safety to your porch with a straightforward DIY project that starts with purchased upper and lower rail and baluster stock. Watch to learn more.
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Transcript:
We're just pulling into town here in St. Joseph where Ray and Kathy Mueller live. The Meuller's have a beautiful front porch and we're going to help them build a new porch railing.
OK, here we are. This is the house right here and there's the porch, just waiting for some rails.
I just had this idea of gentle breezes and lemonade on the front porch.
Hey, guys, how are you doing?
Hey, Ron.
Ray, Kathyhow are you?
So this is the porch yeah?
You bet.
What we want to do is put up some handrails between these posts around the whole perimeter of our porch and then also handrails going down the stairways.
OK.
The posts on the front of the porch are spaced just about perfectly. The way we see it the railing sections can be set in between. On the side though, we'll have to add a post in the center.
So let's start, Kathy, take this, just find the center of this deck right here.
Cathy got the dumb man.
The dumb man? Ok we'll give you the smart job then. Half of 130.
Ha ha trick questions again, sixty five inches.
Cathy, take the drill.
In order to cut a square opening on the deck, we first need to drill a starter hole down.
Surprise, forgot to tell you about that!
Then we cut out the opening using a jigsaw.
Beautiful. OK, Kathy, drop it and see if we got a fit there.
All right. OK, here you go. That's snug, perfect.
Now Ray in order to attach that post to the porch framing, one of us has got to go up under here.
Yeah. Ron.
In the spirit of fair play, we should do this with a little game of chance. What do you take?
All right heads.
You lose. Come on. Let's go.
Yeah right. I lose!
Come on, no welching now.
I somehow figured this was going to happen.
Come on, come on, come on.
In!
Once he's underneath the porch, Ray uses a right angle attachment on the drill to bore a pilot hole.
I'm pretty sure we got that.
Then he attaches the post using leg screws.
OK, great.
All right, guys, here's how I think we should build this railing. If you could just tilt this up for me Kathy. Ray, if you bring that one up. OK, this is going to be the bottom rail, OK? This is going to be the top rail right here.
In between we're going to have several of these pieces here called balusters, that we're going to cut to length. So I think that's going to be our next step. Let's cut a bunch of these.
OK.
Kathy, any time we're going to cut out, what, one hundred and seven balusters now, we want them all to exactly the same length, 20 inches in this case. This is a great way to do it, we've set up a power miter box here. I've actually secured this to the table with some screws. Over here, a little stop block. So all you have to do is to set the piece of wood in here, put this end up against the block and go ahead and cut and then regardless of whether you're cutting one or two or a thousand of these, they're all going to be exactly the same length.
OK, give it a whirl. Here you go. Beautiful.
We get ready to start the next phase of the project while Kathy continues to cut those 103 balusters.
What we're going to do right now is we're going to assemble the railing first by screwing the bottom rail into one end of the baluster and we'll do all those and then we're going to stand it up on end and we're going to nail on the top rail.
Put this on now.
OK.
All those balusters in place. Kathy line up, there should be a mark under there, you see it?
Yes.
Ok just line it up.
OK
You know we are going to have to tweak these a little bit to get them to stay, OK, we're up, we're hot work.
What we're going to have to do to keep these from swivelling is we're going to need two nails in each one because we've only got one screw in the bottom,
Right.
So we'll put two nails in the top.
All right come on Ray.
There we go.
OK, looking great, huh?