`Very rarely do people know, have the slightest idea, what holds up stairways. They don`t think twice about it,” says Chuck Hughes, 32, a carpenter/renovator who painstakingly restored that spine of the sagging staircase in a 100-year-old Victorian home owned by Tom and Janet Royce.
”I never saw the underside of a bare staircase before,” admits Mrs. Royce. But she and her husband learned, piece by reconstructed piece, and say this project cost an unforeseen $12,000-plus, including preparatory work as well as the carpentry.
This staircase really had a problem. It was walled up in the 1940s, when the house was separated into apartments.
A small apartment consisting of living room, bedroom and kitchen had been created on the second floor. For a private entrance to the latter, the original staircase`s last three turners, the steps that twisted down into the interior of the first floor, had been removed.
The staircase then emptied straight down into an outer double-door front entry typical of Victorian homes. This consists of thick outer doors, then a tiny space–usually with mosaic tile on the floor and some kind of rack for hanging clothes–and a second set of more ornate inner doors leading into the house itself. This was designed to keep out blasts of outdoor air. In the
`40s, a hole had been cut through the right wall of this tiny entry to connect the outdoors with the stairway.
”When we knocked down this wall, we found they had turned the mahogany banister on its side, and it ran inside the wall,” Mrs. Royce says.
”They had thrown away the cherry balusters and some posts. The big post at the base of the staircase was found on the third floor. It had been been made into a lantern. We found several mahogany balls that went on these posts in a box in the basement. A missing part of the handrail was also found in the basement.
”When they did this, they pulled out a false extension of the second floor`s upper balcony, so they could plaster over the staircase.”
It was in this state that the Royces bought the big three-floor Victorian house in May, 1984. Old documents they found showed that ”the $300 final payment to the master carpenter was made a hundred years ago,” says Mrs. Royce. Thus, they decided to restore the staircase to its original glory.
”It took us forever to do it. It was finished last April. The carpenter started in December. And before that we had been knocking out plaster.”
The Royces interviewed two other carpenters before settling on Chuck Hughes.
The Royces heard that Hughes did restorations. ”He loved the house and the idea of doing the job,” says Mrs. Royce.
Hughes` company, Interior Motives, 274-6574, does mainly restorations, all by referral, he says. He has done restoration work for a dozen years. ”I just work on old homes, mostly from the pre-1900s; I enjoy it,” he says, adding that he got into it when his father bought an 1886 Queen Anne house in Old Town, ”quite distinctive, and I helped restore it.”
”It is amazing what you can learn from taking a house apart. You can see exactly how it is made,” says Hughes, who recently finished work on a distinguished old mansion on Astor Street.
Mrs. Royce says when Hughes began, he did quite a bit of meditating. ”As they go down, the stairs change in size, so he`d sit and contemplate and draw. He measured them and added three curving steps at the bottom, because they had been straightened out.”
”It was quite a reconstruction job,” Hughes says. ”They had torn out all the spindles.” Replacing them was not the major problem, however.
He found that the staircase had pulled away from the wall. ”The carriage was sinking a little bit. The treads wanted to pull out. The whole staircase had to be taken apart–all the wedges from underneath taken out. Then you jack it up–both the carriages or the supports for the tread on each side.
”When you jack everything up, you have to level everything out,” he says. To do this, new wedges are glued in. ”Then the treads go back on. We restored most of the old ones. The bottom stairs, or `winders` (which had been taken out) were all new treads.”
These new treads were all pine. Hughes says that in the Royce staircase,
”the balusters are cherry. The banister is mahogany, the newel-posts mahogany, the spindles cherry and the staircase pine.” The mix of woods in the original staircase were pulled together with a dark mahogany stain.
Once the staircase was jacked up and put back in place, not only did some of the treads no longer fit, but ”the mahogany banister did not fit right. There was maybe a 4-inch gap,” says Mrs. Royce.
”The original mahogany we have in the house is from Honduras, and nobody has it any more. We now have 3 inches of Philippine mahogany in the banister. You only can tell where it is because I tell everybody.”
All new balusters and spindles were made of cherry.
Mrs. Royce found 16 originals in the basement, but they were painted white and would have to be stripped. ”Instead of having them stripped to match the new ones, we just went ahead and had all of them made. Once the design was set up on the lathe, it turned out to be cheaper for us to get all new.” They were milled by a small company that does this special work for Hughes.
”A lot of pieces I made myself on the job,” Hugh says, such as the three newel-posts and what he calls the return nosings (the tread edge) on the bottom stairs.
Hughes says that when he pulled down the plaster on the triangular wall under the staircase, he found evidence of a fire, the damage from which he says, ”contributed to the carriage coming down in one corner.” It had been covered by plaster and paint.
”This happens a lot,” Hughes says. ”People who burn the paint off the outside of a building (with a blowtorch) often start a fire inside.” That`s apparently what happened here. Paint had been cleaned off the porch in an area that corresponded on the inside with stair wall damage. (After repairs, this wall also had to be replastered.)
Most homeowners, getting the news that their staircase might be in serious trouble, are surprised at the considerable repair cost. As Hughes says, ”The shoulders definitely come down. The people that do take on a project like that do love their house.”
”Most staircases, once they loosen up, they only get worse. As the one side drops, the treads pull out from the wall stringer (or support for the tread, a synonym for the carriage, which carries the weight of the stairs), and there`s no support. There`s no way of temporarily making it secure or look good,” he says. ”It just falls apart. The wood starts splintering. It can be quite dangerous.”
The now handsome Victorian, its looks restored, was on the Rogers Park Historical Society House Walk last October, and 200 people walked through, says Mrs. Royce.
Her advice to anyone undertaking a similar project: ”You can`t take a regular carpenter. You have to have somebody that loves old houses.” Hughes, she says, is ”a fine artist. It was very easy to work with somebody whose love was restoration.”
Hughes` only regret: ”I haven`t seen the staircase with the rug and everything on it. I rarely get to see the finished product of my work. The painter gets to see it, stained and all, when the beauty really comes out.”
