Exterior & Finish Carpentry
Stair builder for custom homes around Asheville.
Treads, risers, balusters and custom posts, built so every step feels exactly like the one before it.
- Trade
- Exterior & finish carpentry
- Scope
- Treads, risers, balusters, custom posts and skirt boards
- Not
- General remodeling · Production framing
- Region
- Western North Carolina — about 45 minutes of Asheville
The job
What this actually involves
A stair is the one piece of trim carpentry your body checks without asking your brain — your foot expects the next step to be the same height as the last one, every time, and it notices instantly if it isn't. That's the whole discipline: consistent rise and run from the first step to the last, joinery on the treads and risers that doesn't creak or shift, and baluster spacing that passes code without ever being the thing you look at.
Interior or exterior, the skirt board is what separates a stair that looks finished from one that looks framed. It has to run tight and straight against a wall that's rarely actually straight, which means every piece gets scribed to the house it's in, not cut to a number on a plan.
Custom newel posts and rail transitions are where the specific house shows up — matching an existing rail profile, or building a post that has to carry both the structural load and the look the rest of the trim in the house is doing. I'll walk your stair with you and tell you straight what's a clean fit and what needs a different approach.
Work
Related work
FAQ
Questions worth answering up front
- Do you build stairs from scratch or just finish an existing framed stair?
- Both. I'll frame a new stair or finish treads, risers, rail and skirt on a stair someone else already framed — the second one only goes well if the framing underneath is actually square, which I'll check before I start.
- Can you match a new stair to existing railing elsewhere in the house?
- Yes — matching an existing post and rail profile is normal scope for me. Bring me the profile or the house, and I'll tell you what it takes to match it.
- Do you build interior and exterior stairs?
- Both. Interior treads and rail, and exterior stairs off a deck or porch — same joinery standards either way.
- How do you keep baluster spacing to code without it looking like a grid?
- Spacing has to pass code every time, not just look right from across the room — I lay it out from both ends of the run so it lands even, and I'll show you the layout before anything's fastened.