Archives: Finish Carpentry

Custom Stairs

By Todd Fratzel on Finish Carpentry, Framing, Interior Decorating

Custom Brazilian Cherry Staircase In our new home we built the custom stairs with Brazilian Cherry treads, handrails and newel post. The risers and stringers are made from poplar. Brazilian Cherry is a really beautiful wood and extremely dense. I’m told it’s about 100 times harder than red oak. As you can see in the…

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Porch Skirt for Farmers Porch

By Todd Fratzel on Decks & Porches, Finish Carpentry, Siding & Trim

Farmers Porch With Lattice Skirt The farmer’s porch in the adjacent photo has a complete pvc lattice skirt around the bottom of the porch framing. Raised porches look best with some sort of skirt to hide the framing and keep small animals and children out of the space. Materials The entire porch skirt is built…

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Miterless Moulding Systems

By Todd Fratzel on Finish Carpentry, Interior Decorating

Anyone-Can-Do-This Miterless Moulding Systems From Fypon® ARCHBOLD, OHIO – If you can make a straight cut with a handsaw, you can transform a room with a decorative crown Miterless Moulding System from Fypon®. “We’ve completely removed the fear and the hassles for homeowners of adding mouldings to the home,” says Tina Mealer of Fypon. “There…

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Storage Stairs: Turning Steps into Drawers

By Todd Fratzel on Closets & Storage, Finish Carpentry

Storage Under Stairs A guest post by Marcy Tate. Did you know that stairs can be made into storage drawers? It’s definitely possible to turn the unused, wasted space under the stairs and into storage space. Storage stairs create easily accessible storage space. Shoes, magazines, books, and more are the perfect size for these drawers.…

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Baby Girl Nursery With Chair Rail

By Todd Fratzel on Finish Carpentry, Interior Decorating, Painting and Finishing

Baby Nursery with Chair Rail The following is a popular article that ran a couple years ago. Adding chair rails to rooms can be a great way to turn an ordinary room into an architectural pleasing room. Just before our daughter was born we remodeled one of the bedrooms that would become the nursery. The…

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Free Stair Stringer Calculator

By Todd Fratzel on Finish Carpentry, Framing

Stair Stringer Calculator – Spreadsheet Recently I wrote an article about how to build stairs. Since then I’ve had inquiries about some type of calculator or spreadsheet to quickly calculate the rise and run measurements for the stringers. So I sat down and put together a quick Excel spreadsheet that helps you calculate the total…

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How To Install Simple Window Casing

By Todd Fratzel on Finish Carpentry

Butt and Pass Window Trim Trimming out a window can be quite simple if you stick to the basics. The simplest window casing consists of flat stock trim with butted corners (butt and pass). Butted window casing works great and eliminates the dreaded “opened” miter joints that are famous with more elaborate miter joints. The…

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Stairs Construction – How To Build

By Todd Fratzel on Finish Carpentry, Framing

Staircase Design / Drawing We built our new garage with attic trusses so I could have a space for a workshop. In order to get to that space I need to build a staircase.  As you can see from the sketch my plan is to build a staircase that has a short run to a…

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