Standard & Custom Shaped Tigerwood Steps, Curved Half-round Starter Stairs. Here’s a set of custom Tigerwood hardwood stairs and wood railings we made for a family in Toronto, Ontario. The total job consisted of 38 stair treads and 50′ of Tigerwood handrailing and box newels, so I have a feeling that this Toronto family must spend their entire day climbing wood steps.

Tigerwood, or for the wood techies “goncale alves” is a difficult wood to work with for a number of reasons. For starters only about 25% of the wood has the black streaks that Tigerwood is known for. Some of the streaking is dramatic and as black as is possible. Other boards have only minor colour patterns.

So you must decide where you want the dramatic wood and where you can accept some less exciting grain. In this case we used the best boards on the stair treads at the bottom figuring they would be most obvious and come in direct contact with the Tigerwood floors. You can see this in the picture of the starter steps above, taken before the railing was installed. For the upper set of stairs that were caught between two walls, lighting was lower and traffic was lighter so we used the wood with less figure for these treads.

Likewise the Box Newels (#3811) and handrail were made of less figured wood. A 1 5/8″ x 2 5/8″ strip of wood is less able, due to its size, to really show off the highly figured grain, thus it is a good location to use the more uniformly coloured material. Tigerwood Box Newel #3811 & Painted Spindles

Using Hardwood Flooring on Your Landing:
For Mike we made 40″ strips of 3 1/4″ Tigerwood flooring to cover his landings. He could have used regular flooring, but by using this material the landings had no small pieces of flooring spliced in the length, thus the landings looked the same as the Tigerwood hardwood stairs.

For the pie shaped treads Mike mailed us paper patterns and all treads were cut accordingly. They were shipped slightly oversized and he custom fit them onsite. I think you’ll agree that he has done a pretty fantastic job!

If you are looking to recover stairs and don’t want to do it yourself, we can put you into touch with Mike Webb for any clients that are living in the Toronto area. He has been in the construction trades for many years and comes with an extensive list of clients that highly recommend his services.

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Hard wood Steps: This is where you will find all the things you can learn on this website about recovering your old steps with new hardwood steps.

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