Two Bin Bags of Carpet and a Flight That Has Stopped Being Uniform
Carpet comes off a domestic flight in about forty minutes and the gripper takes another hour, and what is underneath is almost never a surprise. Builder's softwood, redwood or whitewood, occasionally beech on a better house and sometimes a plywood tread with a glued-on nosing bead. Worn hollow along the walking line, peppered with staple holes, and still carrying the setting-out numbers somebody pencilled on the risers sixty or a hundred years ago. None of that is a problem. The strings are sound, the carriage is sound, and the hardwood caps waiting in the hall in their shrink wrap are nineteen millimetres thick and profiled to lap straight over what is there.
The problem appears the first time anybody puts a tape on the bottom step. A tread cap is a constant: it goes onto every tread in the flight and onto neither of the two floors, and that asymmetry is the entire job. Between one tread and the next the constant turns up at the top of the riser and at the bottom of it and cancels itself out, so the twelve interior risers of a fourteen-riser flight do not move by a hair. The first riser is measured up from a floor that received nothing, so it grows by the full cap thickness. The last is measured up to a landing that received nothing, so it shrinks by the same amount. One nineteen-millimetre cap, applied uniformly and beautifully, opens thirty-eight millimetres between the tallest riser in the flight and the shortest.
Then there is the landing. Retreads almost never happen on their own — the flight is being done because the floor above is being done — and the engineered board going down up there carries a thickness of its own that lands in the same arithmetic with the opposite sign. Which is why the useful order of work on a retread is not strip, fit, finish. It is measure what you have, settle the two end risers on paper, and only then decide what thickness of cap you are allowed to buy.
What sits on a step once it has been capped
- Hardwood tread caps — the bought layer, one constant thickness repeated on every tread and on neither floor, which is what moves the two end risers Stair Stringer Drop Cut Calculator
- New floor finishes at both ends — laid on the hall below and the landing above after the stair is done, and the only two thicknesses that can cancel the caps out Flooring Calculator
- Riser boards — faced onto each existing riser and finishing behind the cap above, so their thickness comes off the going rather than off the rise
- Adhesive bed — full coverage rather than dabs, because a cap carried on packers with a bead around them drums under every footfall
- Existing treads and risers — the flight you inherit, hollowed along the walking line and carrying whatever riser spread it already had before anyone arrived Stair Riser Spread Tolerance Checker
- Cut stringer and carriage — the one thing on this job nobody can adjust, since its riser positions were sawn before the house had electricity Stair Rise & Run Calculator
Measure the Flight You Have Before You Order the One You Want
An old flight is not a datum. It was set out to a total rise that has since been screeded over, settled onto a bay window footing, or altered when somebody rebuilt the landing to take a loft ladder. A cap preserves whatever it is laid on, faithfully, at nineteen millimetres of remove. So the first number on this job is not the cap thickness; it is how much of the permitted riser variation the flight is already spending.
Take every riser, not the two that feel wrong underfoot. Measure nosing to nosing on the surfaces a foot actually lands on, with one instrument for the whole flight — a straightedge laid along the nosings with a steel rule off it, or a digital depth gauge, but not a tape at the bottom and a laser at the top, because the difference between those two belongs to the instruments rather than to the stair. Write the fourteen numbers down in order. The list takes ten minutes and it is the only record of the flight as found that will ever exist.
The shape of that list is more useful than its extremes. One outlier at the bottom and thirteen matching risers above it means a floor finish arrived after the stair was set, and it will be a whole thickness — six millimetres of levelling compound, twelve of engineered board, twenty-two of tile on a bed. One outlier at the top means the landing was rebuilt or screeded. A steady creep of half a millimetre a step from one end to the other means the flight was cut off a total rise it never had, and no overlay repairs it: the caps ride the drift and hand it back at the top.
Settle the limit that list is judged against before the first cap is ordered, not at inspection. The North American model codes work flight-wide on the two extremes: IRC Section R311.7.5.1 and IBC Section 1011.5.4 limit the difference between the greatest riser in a flight and the smallest to three-eighths of an inch, or 9.5 mm, wherever in the run those two happen to sit. Approved Document K asks for equal risers within a flight in England and Wales, with BS 5395-1 behind it — a stricter framing of the same requirement rather than a looser one. And because this is an alteration to an existing stair rather than a new one, how much of the current requirement applies is a question the International Existing Building Code's alteration provisions answer differently by jurisdiction. Ask while the flight is still carpeted.
- Lift the carpet and the gripper on the whole flight before measuring anything — a nosing under carpet reads differently from the same nosing bare.
- Number the risers on the wall string in pencil, one to fourteen, so every later measurement has somewhere unambiguous to go.
- Measure every riser nosing to nosing with one instrument, and write the number against its riser number rather than trusting the order to memory.
- Record the tallest and the shortest, and note whether they are neighbours, at opposite ends, or the two ends of a steady drift.
- Straightedge each tread across its width and along its length, and mark the hollows — they decide how the caps get bedded.
- Get underneath with a torch where the flight is open, and photograph the carriage, the wedges and the housings while there is still access.
Enter the tallest and the shortest riser off the list you have just written, before any cap thickness is chosen. What matters here is not the pass or the fail but the margin line: a flight already spending six of its 9.5 millimetres has three and a half left to give a retread, and a retread wants none.
The largest riser you measured anywhere in the flight.
The smallest riser you measured anywhere in the flight.
The variation your adopted code allows across one flight.
How many risers the flight contains from floor to floor.
Finished floor to finished floor, measured over the whole flight.
Spread between tallest and shortest riser
0.25 in
The riser spread measured is 0.12 in inside the variation entered. Re-measure after the floor finishes go down at both ends, because that is when a flight that was inside the limit most often stops being. Matching the figures quoted is not compliance. The rest of the requirement, and the installed work, are outside what this page can see.
- Permitted variation for this flight
- 0.38 in
- Margin left before the limit
- 0.12 in
- Uniform riser height for this flight
- 7.5 in
- Tallest riser above the uniform height
- 0 in
- Shortest riser below the uniform height
- 0.25 in
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Stair Riser Spread Tolerance Checker: 0.25 in — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Add the equipment this sizes
This result is a specification — 0.25 in — not a quantity. Put the thing it sizes into your project: how many, what you call it, and your supplier’s price.
What this calculation does not cover
- Works from the two extremes you supply. It cannot find an outlier you did not measure, and the rule it applies is flight-wide rather than pairwise.
- Riser height is one of several stair checks. Tread depth uniformity, nosing projection, headroom and handrail geometry are all separately enforced and a flight can pass here and fail those.
The Constant Adds to the Treads and to Neither Floor
Write the three thicknesses down as letters and the whole problem fits on a cigarette packet. Call the cap thickness t, the new finish going down in the hall below after the stair is done f-low, and the new finish going down on the landing above f-up. The bottom riser changes by t minus f-low. The top riser changes by f-up minus t. Every riser between them changes by nothing at all, because both of its ends moved together.
One rule falls straight out of that, and it is the sentence worth carrying off this page: make both floor build-ups equal the cap thickness and the flight comes out exactly as it went in. Nineteen millimetres of solid hardwood on the treads, nineteen on the landing, nineteen in the hall, and every riser in the flight — first, last and the twelve in between — is the height it was when the carpet was on it. Nothing needs cutting, nothing needs packing, and the riser spread you measured is the riser spread you finish with. It is the only version of this job with no arithmetic left in it.
Real jobs rarely hand you both floors. The common one runs like this: the hall below is existing tile that is staying, so f-low is zero; the landing above is getting fifteen-millimetre engineered board on a two-millimetre acoustic mat, so f-up is seventeen; and the caps are nineteen. Bottom riser plus nineteen. Top riser minus two. Twelve risers unmoved in the middle. The flight now has twenty-one millimetres between its tallest riser and its shortest before you count whatever it was already spending — more than double the model-code figure, on a job where nothing has been cut badly.
Four responses to that are honest and one is not. The honest ones, in order of how well they age: change the cap to match what the two floors are actually going to be, which is a specification conversation and costs nothing on day one; bring the hall floor up to the cap thickness, which fixes the worse of the two ends, since the bottom step is the one a foot arrives at off a level floor; take the bottom tread out and reset it on a packed bearing lower by the cap thickness, the usual answer when the hall cannot move; or abandon capping and remove the existing treads entirely, so the new tread is the tread rather than an addition to one. That last is a different job and should be priced as one.
The response that is not honest is a thinner cap on the bottom step alone. It looks like the fix — plane the starter cap down and the first riser drops back towards the rest — and what it actually does is split the error across two steps instead of removing it. Whatever thickness comes off the bottom cap, the second riser has to make up, because it is now measured from a tread sitting lower than every tread above it. Take the whole nineteen millimetres off and the first riser is perfect while the second is out by the entire cap. Take half off and both are out by nine and a half, which is the whole of the model-code allowance spent on the two steps at the foot of the flight before anybody has looked at the top one. Halved is the best that trick can ever do, and that second-riser figure is what the drop-cut page reports on its variation line — which is the reason the line exists rather than just the headline figure.
| Hall floor laid after the stair | Landing floor laid after the stair | Bottom riser moves | Top riser moves | Spread this introduces |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing new — existing tile stays | Nothing new — existing boards stay | +19 mm | −19 mm | 38 mm |
| Nothing new | 15 mm engineered on a 2 mm mat | +19 mm | −2 mm | 21 mm |
| Nothing new | 19 mm solid, matched to the caps | +19 mm | Unchanged | 19 mm |
| 19 mm solid, matched to the caps | 19 mm solid, matched to the caps | Unchanged | Unchanged | None |
| 4 mm levelling compound and 2 mm vinyl | 22 mm board on a 4 mm underlay | +13 mm | +7 mm | 13 mm |
Read this one sideways on a retread. Enter the cap as the starter tread thickness and the new hall finish as the lower floor build-up, and the answer it returns — the amount a new-build carpenter would saw off the foot of the stringer — is the amount your bottom riser is out by, because on an existing stringer there is no foot left to saw. A negative answer is the good one: it means the hall floor is thicker than the cap and the bottom step is going down rather than up.
From the surface the stringer will stand on, up to the bare landing deck.
The number of risers the flight will have, floor to floor.
The thickness of the treads that will sit on the stringer cuts.
The bottom tread's thickness, where it differs from the rest.
Finish going down at the base of the stair after the stringer is set.
Finish going down on the landing above after the stringer is set.
Drop cut at the base of the stringer
0.5 in
Take 0.50 in off the bottom horizontal cut, keeping the cut square and the bearing full. The tread arrangement entered introduces 0.00 in of variation across the flight, inside the 3/8 in the model codes allow.
- Uniform riser height for the finished flight
- 7.13 in
- Total finished rise
- 9.5 ft
- First riser as built
- 7.13 in
- Second riser as built
- 7.13 in
- Top riser as built
- 7.13 in
- Variation this introduces across the flight
- 0 in
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Stair Stringer Drop Cut Calculator: 0.5 in — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Add the equipment this sizes
This result is a specification — 0.5 in — not a quantity. Put the thing it sizes into your project: how many, what you call it, and your supplier’s price.
What this calculation does not cover
- Cut stringers carried on their horizontal cuts. Housed stringers with wedged treads set the tread position from the housing instead, and the adjustment is made in the routing rather than at the base.
- Assumes the stringer's top cut is set from the bare landing deck. Where the stair hangs from a header at a fixed height instead, the top attachment absorbs part of this and has to be set out separately.
The Same Nineteen Millimetres Lands in Six Other Checks
Almost every governed vertical dimension on a stair is measured from the pitch line — the sloping plane that joins the tread nosings — and a retread raises that plane by the cap thickness along its whole length. Handrail height, guard height and headroom are all measured from it, all three lose exactly the cap thickness, and none of them looks any different afterwards. That is what makes this the group of checks that gets skipped: nothing visibly moved, because everything moved together.
Handrails are where it bites first, because the band is narrow and old stairs sit near the bottom of it. IRC Section R311.7.8.1 puts the rail between 34 and 38 inches above the sloped plane adjoining the tread nosings; Approved Document K works to 900 to 1000 millimetres above the pitch line for a domestic flight. A rail sitting at 34 and a half inches — perfectly compliant on Monday — is at 33 and three-quarters once nineteen millimetres of cap is under it, without anybody having touched the rail. Guards on the open side of a flight are measured the same way, from a line connecting the leading edges of the treads, under IRC Section R312.1.2. Headroom under a bulkhead or under the flight above is six feet eight inches under IRC Section R311.7.2 and two metres under Approved Document K, and a Victorian stair that measured 2005 millimetres before the caps went on measures 1986 after them.
The horizontal dimensions move in both directions at once, which is why they need adding up rather than eyeballing. The riser board goes on the face of each existing riser and takes its own thickness off the back of the tread above; the cap's return nosing projects past that riser board and gives some of it back at the front. Whether the going grows or shrinks is the difference between those two numbers and the projection of the worn nosing you cut off, and IRC Section R311.7.5.2 limits how much the tread depth may vary across a flight just as R311.7.5.1 limits the riser. Nosing projection sits in the tread profile provision at R311.7.5.3, which the retread meets easily — every cap carries the same factory return — right up until somebody fits a different profile on the bottom step. Width is the sleeper in the group: a skirt board added to cover a chewed wall string eats the clear width that R311.7.1 governs. Adopted edition and local amendment decide the actual figures in all of these; take them from the code the inspector is holding, not from the one you learned.
| What the retread does | The check it lands in | Where the requirement sits |
|---|---|---|
| Raises every tread nosing by the cap thickness | Handrail height above the pitch line | IRC R311.7.8.1; Approved Document K for England and Wales |
| Raises every tread nosing by the cap thickness | Guard height on the open side of the flight | IRC R312.1.2, measured from the line joining the tread leading edges |
| Raises every tread nosing by the cap thickness | Headroom under a bulkhead or the flight above | IRC R311.7.2; Approved Document K |
| Adds a riser board at the back of every tread | Tread depth and its uniformity across the flight | IRC R311.7.5.2 |
| Replaces a worn nosing with the cap's factory return | Nosing projection and how much it varies | IRC R311.7.5.3, the tread profile provision |
| Adds a skirt board over a damaged wall string | Clear stair width at and above handrail height | IRC R311.7.1 |
The Old Nosing Has to Come Off, and What Is Under It Is Not Flat
Most retrofit caps are supplied with their own return nosing and are meant to lap a tread that has been cut back flush with the face of the riser below. That cut is the one genuinely skilled operation in the job. A track saw set to the tread thickness handles the open middle of the run; the last twenty millimetres at each end is buried where the tread runs into the string, and an oscillating multi-tool with a fresh plunge blade finishes it. The cut has to be square in plan as well as in section, because a cap laid on a tread whose front edge tapers by two millimetres over the width sits on a wedge, and no amount of adhesive turns a wedge into a bearing.
How the tread is held decides how much of it you can safely remove. On a cut string the treads sit on horizontal saw cuts and are nailed or screwed down from above, so cutting the nosing back removes nothing structural. On a housed string — closed on one or both sides, which is most British domestic work and the arrangement BS 585-1 describes — the tread runs into a routed housing and is held there by a glued wedge driven from beneath, with a glue block in the internal angle. The last inch at each end is inside the housing and must not be cut into. Sound the wedges from underneath before you start; one that has dried out and dropped is a squeak you are about to seal in permanently.
Then the flatness, which is the thing that most often gets discovered after the adhesive is open. Sixty years of traffic hollows a softwood tread along the walking line, and two or three millimetres of dish through the middle third is ordinary rather than exceptional. Lay a rigid nineteen-millimetre cap over that and it bridges: the cap bears at the front and the back and drums in the middle, which is audible on the first day and worse on the four hundredth. Straightedge every tread both ways and deal with what you find before anything is bedded — belt-sand the high points back, or choose an adhesive with enough body to fill the hollow, and do not resort to packers with a bead of adhesive around them. That builds a drum on purpose.
Bedded, Not Nailed
A cap has one structural job, which is full bearing on the tread beneath it, and one job everybody actually judges it on, which is silence. Retread squeaks come from two interfaces, and the cap seals both of them in. The old tread moving on the carriage, or a dried wedge working in its housing, is the one that can still be reached on the morning the carpet comes off and not after the cap goes down — so re-drive and re-glue the wedges, replace the glue blocks, and where the underside is open, screw up through the carriage into the tread before you cap anything. Nobody will ever have that access again.
The cap itself wants three things: a full-coverage bed rather than dabs, weight or clamping on it until the adhesive cures, and as few face fixings as the manufacturer's sheet permits — a pin through the top of a hardwood cap is a filled hole visible for twenty years under a raking hall light. Where fixings are needed, pin through the nosing so the riser board covers the head, or screw from behind. And condition the material before it goes near the flight: the National Wood Flooring Association's Installation Guidelines governs moisture content and acclimation for wood laid over a wood substrate, and the gap between a cap that arrived at twelve per cent and a heated hall running at seven in February shows up as a shrinkage line against the string in the spring, not on handover day.
The Balustrade Was Set to a Line That Just Moved
On a cut-string stair the balusters are doweled or housed into the tread ends, often two to a tread, and a one-piece cap with a return nosing cannot be dropped over them. Either the cap gets cut into a two-piece scribe around every baluster foot — which looks exactly as bad as it sounds by the third step — or the balustrade comes off. Most retreads take it off, and once it is off the rail has to come back at a height reset from the new pitch line anyway, so the two decisions are really one decision made early.
Newels do not come off. The bottom newel is normally bolted through the trimmer or morticed to the string and it is staying exactly where it is, which means its cap height above the first tread reduces by the cap thickness while the rail above it has to rise to stay in the band. On a stair where the newel cap and the rail already met tightly, that is a joint which stops closing, and the answer is usually a new newel cap or a turned extension rather than a fudged rail angle. Check it with a straightedge before the balustrade is dismantled, while the existing relationship is still there to be measured.
The rail order changes too, and by more than people expect. The total rise of the flight has moved by the difference between the two floor build-ups, and the total run has moved by whatever the nosing arithmetic did — the cap's factory return against the worn edge you cut off, less the riser board. Both feed the raking length. A rail cut off the pre-retread numbers comes up short at the top of the flight, which is where the joint is most visible and where there is least material to recover with.
One thing not to carry across from a deck: the opening limitation for a stair guard is not the same test as the one used on a level guard. IRC Section R312.1.3 governs it, and a larger sphere is permitted in the triangular opening formed by the tread, the riser and the bottom rail than anywhere else on the guard. Spacing worked out for a landing rail is therefore not automatically right on the rake, and the adopted edition decides both figures.
Order the rail after the caps are down and the nosing line is real, not off the survey. Enter the rise and run the flight finished at, remembering that the run is measured to the new nosing line rather than the worn one you cut off, and take the answer to a stick length your supplier actually racks.
SettingsSettings for this calculation
The standard allowance most suppliers and estimating guides assume for ordinary work.
The total vertical height the staircase climbs.
The total horizontal distance the staircase covers.
The length handrail stock is sold in.
Extra rail on top of the sloped length, for the end cuts and the joints at the newels.
Handrail length needed
15.86 linear ft
- Sloped rail length (before waste)
- 14.42 linear ft
- Sticks needed
- 2 x 8 ft sticks
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Handrail Length Calculator: 15.86 linear ft — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- The hypotenuse is the pitch-line length between the bottom and top of one straight flight and nothing else. It excludes the horizontal extensions past the top and bottom risers that accessible and commercial stairs are generally required to have, a distance that is jurisdictional and usually given as a fixed run at the top and one tread depth at the bottom, and it excludes goosenecks, easings, volutes and wall returns, which are bought as fittings rather than cut from the run.
- The headline figure already contains the cutting allowance and the stick count is worked out from that same padded number, so ordering the sticks and then adding a further margin buys the allowance twice. The count is a plain division of padded length by stock length, which assumes the offcut from one length carries on the run and that a joint may fall anywhere; a rail that must be one unbroken piece, or spliced only over a newel, needs a longer stock size than the count shows.
- The stick count is not a converted number, because metric rail is genuinely shorter than the imperial length listed beside it: 2.4 m is 38 mm under 8 ft and 4.8 m is 77 mm under 16 ft. The same staircase can therefore call for one more length on metric than on imperial, and that extra length is real stock rather than a rounding artefact.
- This is a purchase quantity, not a support schedule. It sets no bracket or newel spacing, no mounting height above the nosing line and no grip profile, yet the fixing interval is what decides whether the rail resists the concentrated load demanded of a handrail in your jurisdiction, a figure commonly quoted near 0.9 kN (200 lbf) applied in any direction at any point.
It Is Also the Only Way Upstairs
A stair under refurbishment is a circulation route with a joiner on it, not a work area that people walk through, and that constraint shapes the programme more than the joinery does. Sequence the flight so there is always a continuous way up — alternate treads, or half a flight a day with the other half in service — and where a tread is out, whatever replaces it is full width, full depth and fixed down. OSHA's construction stairway rule at 29 CFR 1926.1052 is written for site stairs rather than houses, but its logic is the right standard to hold in one: no partial treads left in service, nothing temporary that is not secured, and the route lit at night.
Dust is the second constraint and the more serious one, because a stairwell is the building's chimney: anything liberated on step four rises and settles in the bedrooms. The risers on an old flight are painted. In United States housing built before 1978 that paint is presumed to contain lead unless it has been tested, and disturbing it brings the work inside the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E — a certification and work-practice requirement, not a recommendation. In Great Britain the same exposure is governed by the Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002 and the Approved Code of Practice L132, and pre-1992 domestic paint is where it turns up. Sanding a painted riser with an unshrouded machine is among the worst things it is possible to do in an occupied house.
The third constraint is chemistry against the clock. Adhesive open time and the cure before traffic are stated on the product sheet, they vary from a few hours to overnight, and they do not negotiate with a family that needs the stairs at six. Plan the day backwards from the cure rather than forwards from the first cut, and say out loud on day one which nights the flight is out of service. It is a far easier conversation before the carpet is in a skip.
- Agree which nights the flight is unusable before any work starts, and write it into the programme rather than discovering it at four o'clock.
- Work alternate treads or half-flights so a continuous route survives every stage of the job.
- Seal the door at the head of the flight and run on-tool extraction for every cut and every sanding pass.
- Test or presume lead on painted risers by the age of the house, and follow the regime that applies in your jurisdiction rather than the one that is convenient.
- Bed the caps working down the flight, so nobody has to walk on a green joint to reach the ones still to do.
- Reset the handrail brackets to a height measured from the finished nosings, not from the old ones, and check the band at the top and the bottom of the run.
Two Numbers Worth Writing on the Underside
Pencil the record where it will survive: on the back of the top riser board, or on the carriage underneath if the flight is open. The cap thickness, the two floor build-ups as actually laid rather than as specified, the riser count, the measured spread before and after, and the height the handrail brackets were reset to. The whole of this job is a single thickness repeated fourteen times, and it is the repetition that makes it invisible to the next person: a stair that has been capped once looks like a stair, and the only clue that it was capped is a bottom step which is slightly taller than the rest.
And be plain about what none of this establishes. A retread adds a small dead load and no live load, and a sound domestic flight takes it without comment — but nothing on this page checks that the flight is sound. A split carriage, a cracked string, a tread bearing on nothing at the wall end, a newel bolted through a trimmer that has been notched for a pipe: capping hides all of it under something that looks new and expensive, and a guard fixed to a rotten string is worse than a guard everybody could see was rotten. Look while it is open, photograph what you find, and where the answer is not obvious hand it to somebody who will put their name to it.
Settle These Before the Caps Are Ordered
On a retread the cap thickness is not a finish choice, it is a stair dimension — and it has to be agreed against two floor build-ups and a measured flight before anybody buys anything.
- The spread of the flight as found — Every riser measured nosing to nosing with one instrument, with the tallest and the shortest recorded before a single tread is touched.
- Cap thickness against both floor build-ups — The bottom riser moves by the cap less the new hall finish, the top by the new landing finish less the cap. Both are settled on paper, in that order.
- The bottom step's remedy, decided in advance — Bring the hall floor up, reset the bottom tread lower, or change the cap — a thinner starter cap alone only moves the error into the second riser.
- Riser board thickness, taken off the going — It lands at the back of every tread, so run the tread depth check on the going you finish with rather than the one you measured under the carpet.
- Nosing projection the cap actually delivers — Taken from the cap's factory return, not from the worn edge coming off, and held the same on every step including the first and the last.
- Handrail, guard and headroom re-measured from the new pitch line — All three lose exactly the cap thickness, and the brackets are far easier to reset while the balustrade is already off the stair.
- Wedges, glue blocks and carriage fixings — Every squeak reachable from underneath gets fixed before a cap goes over it, because that access closes permanently on the day of the retread.
Opens the calculators above on one screen with the dimensions from this article already filled in. Quantities only — this site publishes no price list, because local prices vary too much to publish honestly.