My biggest problem was how to cut out the three-dimensional form of the handrail from a block of wood. I needed a form of some kind. My wife suggested I should use some soft material to practice on. I asked around a little and found out that there was a kind of poly-urethane sheet that was used for insulation that was firm but still easy to cut. They came in 50 mm thick large sheets. I started to cut the segments of the handrail in this material. I found out that for making some pieces I had to glue two sheets together to get a thicker piece.

In the beginning I made the handrail exactly as it should be in this material that taught me a lot about the geometry. After working for an hour with the material however I got a sore throat. I thought it was the dust from the material that irritated my throat and put my vacuum cleaner close to the place there I cut the material. I found however out that it did not help entirely and came to the conclusion that it was the gas contained in the material that came out when I cut it, that irritated my throat. After that I used a mask with filer and was all right.

This exercise with the polyurethane thought me that the important thing was to get the lower surface formed after the railing’s top iron bar. If I could do that properly, the rest would come out in, not an easy, but at least easier way. Until now I had put the handrail together of short pieces of material, which was not the way I would do it in wood off cause. So, from no on I put together blocks of Poly urethane in a size as close to the wooden blocks I would use later as possible. They were approximately 100 mm thick, 300 mm wide and 300-900 mm long.

I now only cut out the lower surface as that was the tricky part. In that way I also got a form that made it possible for me to measure how I should place the three dimensional railing into the block. The tricky thing was to place the block in such an angle that the profile of the handrail would fit into the thickness of 100 mm.

This exercise made it possible for me to estimate how much and what dimension of wood I would need. My friend who is an expert on such things came with me to his timber dealer in Séte and he also helped me to estimate how many planks and of what dimension I would need. I was surprised when I saw how much wood we had to buy.  It was abut 0,4 cubic meters of planks. I had given him a list of the pieces I needed and he took it to his workshop, cut it and glued it together using his big press.

After a few days I stood there with quite a big pile of very heavy blocks of wood that I was supposed to form into an elegant wooden handrail.

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 Our house has an old spiral staircase going from the kitchen on the ground floor up to the second floor. It has a railing of iron but no proper handrail, just a flat iron bar. In the old days it used to be a wooden handrail and at the bottom a nice decoration of some sort. We have the decoration - a fantastic crystal ball - but no handrail. In many houses the owner could not afford to have a handrail as it used to be very expensive and today it is impossible to get a professional carpenter to do anything like that. It has to be done on site and all by hand so it would cost a fortune. So – the only we could get a nice handrail would be to make one myself.

 It took quite a long time for me and a lot of thinking before I decided that I might be able to do it. I was planning every step in the production process in detail and tried to figure out what kind of tools I would need for the work.

I figured out that I would need a number o chisels, a powerful hand hold router, a powerful sabre saw, a rasp and a number of other hand tools. I also realized that I would need access to some heavy professional carpenters workshop machines from time to time, like a planer, a band saw and a table circular saw. I am lucky enough to have a friend that is a professional cabinet maker and he is happy to lend me his workshop as long as he does not have to make the handrail, which he thinks is too big a job. He is also willing to discuss tips and tricks with me as I work along.

The first choice was what kind of wood to use. To be able to work with, it must not be too hard and have an even texture. The most obvious choice was lime or basswood as it is called in US. It has an even almost white colour which makes it very suitable to tint afterwards.

One of the problems was however that the handrail curves quite a lot, which means the pieces of wood did not only have to be quite wide, they also had to be quite thick. The thicker and wider the fewer parts to assemble and the less joints that could go wrong.

Most wood comes in planks that are little more than 50 mm thick and that would not be sufficient. After doing some testing I however came to the conclusion that pieces of at least 100 mm thickness would be needed. So I had to glue at least two planks together to get the right thickness.

Another problem I had was that no shop I was looking in carried router bits of the size I needed for the work. Most of the bits they have in hardware stores are for decoration routing like picture frames and such things. I needed BIG routers with diameters of about 65 mm.

The most difficult problem was however that it took quite a good spatial intelligence – or experience - to figure out how this railing really should look like and after that start to cut it out from a solid, heavy, block of wood. Next time I will tell you how I trained my spatial feeling before I started on the real thing.

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 First of all I like to apologize for not having finished the story about the wine cellar earlier. I can only blame the summer and a lot of other things that I have been occupied with. It is however only one chapter left so let me describe the finishing of the work.

   This time I will tell you about the ceiling and a few other things. The floor above was an old fashioned construction with thin beams of wood supported by a quite heavy beam spanning over the entire cellar. Between the wood they had poured plaster so you could say it was a wood reinforced plaster construction. The plaster surface of the ceiling was coming off in big pieces and was very hard to restore. In some other rooms I had chosen to put in false ceilings of plasterboard just two centimetres under the damaged original plaster ceiling, which did not affect the room height in any visible way. I did not like this construction in the cellar of two reasons, first it did not feel right to use plaster board in a slightly humid environment and secondly, it looked too elegant with such a ceiling in a wine cellar.

Instead I made a both good looking and low cost construction. Between the supporting beam and the walls on both sides of the beam I put thinner secondary beams of 50x75 mm with a distance of 410 mm c/c. These beams were fixed into the wall in one end and rested on a thin laths nailed to the primary beam in the other end. I now had a grid on which I could put a false ceiling of thin brick slates 200x400x20 mm. Above this I had just enough room for 50 mm insulation to keep the low cellar temperature from entering the above bed room.

In my opinion it looked really good.

 As the cellar had been the only storage room we had in the house we needed to assign a space for storage that would not destroy the feeling of the wine cellar. We decided on an entresol made in the same rustic style. The storage for the wine we found in the local Bricomarché. It is a traditional construction made of iron bars that fulfil the purpose well and also looks good.

 I friend gave us a wine barrel in oak from one of the local wineries. We converted that to a table by letting the local glazier cut a round glass plate that we fitted into the rim of the barrel, supported by five champagne corks cut to the right height.