Restoring this old staircase was quite a task. Originally built in the 1890s on Summit Avenue in St Paul. It was the front staircase linking 3 floors in a beautiful but throughly exhausted Victorian row house. Having bore the ravages of American urban history, this opulent single family home had become a chopped up apartment house squalor. And the staircase was a dilapidated rickety nightmare.
Everything on this staircase had to be disassembled and rebuilt with new landings, new stringers ...even the entry had to be moved back to its original location.
Few of the original parts are in their original location. The staircase had been so cannibalized and butchered, that this present restoration is the product of a combination of stairparts, both original and salvaged from a second set of staircase parts saved from another unit in the set of row houses. Of course, there were also a number of newly fabricated parts. All the posts are new, with new moldings made to match.
I would guess that a good 80% of the parts that were used for this reconstruction are original to the 1890s row house, cut from the same trees and milled back in the day. All the parts were refitted and installed in this revamped ensemble and,of course, newly refinished.
-Bill
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