Old Riser Removed, New Riser Installed

Yesterday I removed the rotting eyesore of a top riser and replaced it with the newly cut and primed riser replacement. The hardest part of removing the old riser was removing all the 3" air-driven wire brads that Bryan, our carpenter, put into it from all sides.

There were four nails into the end, eight into each side, four or five in the middle and three into the top edge through the stair lip. Much of the riser crumbled away from the nails, leaving them intact and unmoved.

Hear you can see the porch construction after the riser was removed and the nails pulled. When the old riser was removed, I discovered a good sized fungus growing on the back. Good thing I got to this when I did!

One trick I learned was for pounding out the long, flexible air-driven nails. They tended to bend rather than driving, but after nipping them to about half the original length, I could easily drive out the head to be pulled.

The riser was cut, then primed, then installed. This allowed me to prime all sides, including the cut edges, to protect it from the weather, and hopefully slow the rotting that lead me to this repair.

Notice that both ends were a good fit. I learned the hard way (by not doing it) that I should have shimmed in the riser like I did during the test fit. The gap at the bottom (which you'll notice was also in the original, because that stair step is slightly too tall) is not even all the way across. The good news is that no one but me will notice.

Notice the right side sits perfectly flush with the other board. When I fit the riser in, it fit perfectly flush on both sides. That demonstrated the value of marking directly from the porch. You may remember from my first blog post about replacing the riser, that after shimming it in for a test fit I marked the end from the porch, measured the width of the end board with my compass, and re-marked the line that much shorter.

If I had measured instead of taking a direct measurement, I would have marked the distance, marked and cut it square to the edge, and found angle was not actually 90 degrees. As it was, when I picked up the square to mark the line all the way across I almost marked it square anyway. Thankfully I trusted the line I took from the porch, turned the straight edge to follow the line, and cut at the angle I had scribed. One disaster averted.

You'll notice that I pounded the nails by hand, and I only used three stainless steel nails per support. This should hold just fine, and since they are ribbed and stainless, they shouldn't pull loose or rust through like some of the old ones (which were only galvanized). I hope to paint the riser this weekend and move on to replacing the front porch hand rail and an old wooden storm window.