Railing to Code, Really...

I worked a little bit more on the front porch again last night. I’m redoing the front stairs so that I can install the hand rails. I managed to get the 4x4 posts in before it got too dark to work. Tonight I hope to get the rails connected and the treads put back in place. We’ll see.

One funny and disappointing discovery is that the porch railing is only 35 ¾” high, exactly ¼” short of the code required 3 feet. Oops! Not sure how this happened. Hopefully the inspector won’t notice. I’ll have to be more careful in the back porch to get the railing height exactly right. I figure that if the inspector does notice and ding me for it, I’ll just shim up the cap ¼” until it passes. Then, I’ll remove the shim again. The problem with shimming it up is that the cap won’t be snugly in place anymore and won’t look as good. Oh well.