Mountain Laurel Banister

One of our favorite home projects was installing a mountain laurel banister on our second story. We love the mountain feel it gives to our country home. It adds organic shape and texture to our house and everyone who visits asks how we did it! Below I'll talk you through the steps of how this was installed.

The first step was installing the framework for the mountain laurel. We used rough hewn lumber for a more rugged look, then sanded and stained it a dark brown color. The color we used was Minwax Wood Finish Oil-Based Espresso Interior Stain. This was applied using a combination of paint brushes and towels. After the stain dried, we used Minwax Clear Satin Oil-Based Polyurethane to seal the wood. We used paint sponge brushes to apply the polyurethane in two even layers. The satin sheen isn't too glossy, but added a more finished look to the rough wood.

The next step was prepping the mountain laurel for installation. We purchased the mountain laurel from Asheville Hardware in North Carolina. The mountain laurel comes in bunches with the bark attached in about 8 foot long sections. We hand-sanded the bark off of each piece. Then we completed rough measurements in order to cut down the 8 foot pieces close to the size needed to install them into the banister.

Then depending on each unique piece, Andrew used a circular saw to custom cut each piece of mountain laurel for specific spots on the banister. He started with a few larger, straighter pieces and built out from there weaving the pieces together. They were attached the frame work with deck screws. There was definitely some intricacy involved in getting all of the pieces to fit into the framework!

After each piece was installed, we chose to only use the polyurethane on the mountain laurel so that it's natural honey brown color stood out and contrasted against the darker wood framework. Honestly, the framework ended up much darker than we had anticipated, but we liked the two-toned final product.

Voila! The project was complete. Overall, this project took us two weekends to install. The most time consuming aspect of the entire project was hand-sanding the individual mountain laurel pieces. However, anyone with simple tools and a bit of effort could easily recreate this DIY project.