Today I am helping you understand the pices of the return staircase that we sell and how to put them all together to make either a right hand return or a left hand return.

here we go.....

I have labelled all the parts for you to help distinguish which piece I am actually holding in each photo. Please remember that I am doing this all one handed while holdong the camera with the other, so if you see any discrpancy in levels they are not meant to be there its just a matter of not being able to hold all the pieces exactly straight at the same time. I will explain with each photo.

Here are the contents of the box..

You will see I have labelled all the parts.

Let's begin..

Take the larger set of stairs and place it on your mat straight edge at the bottom as if it is standing on the floor. I then flipped mine on its side for you to see. I suggest you glue it this way too. Please do a dry run first using masking tape to check the fit in your dollhouse.

Then take the landing piece that I have labelled part C and place it on the top of stairs part A. Place the long side of C onto the lip of stairs A (further down it will become clearer which way the angle on the short edge must be facing) I turned the stairs around so you can see the difference in the height of landing C to the stairs A I have circled this for you to see clearer. This is where most customers start to doubt themselves..."it doesnt fit so I must be doing this wrong!" no you're not keep with me here...

This gap is so that the steps added later work. Just for now place part D the large step (you can see in the above picture that there are two sizes, the large step is for the top step of the bottom stairs labelled A) onto the top step of the stairs A Now you can see why there is a gap and that when the steps are applied at the end this tread is flush and works. Do not add the steps until your stairs are glued. leaving your steps off means that you can stain these or paint these seperately so that you get a nice neat finish of your work at the end. Gluing them all together now will make painting so much harder at the end. If you are staining your stairs please do this before gluing your stairs together. Remember stain and glue do not like each other. If you get any glue seeping from your joins the stain will not adhere to it and will show up as white patches.

Now the next step is to put the smaller stair run part B onto the other side of the landing part C

Here you see me place the shorter stair B onto the landing C. In this picture I am showing you the angle of the edge of the landing C and which way up the landing needs to be to accept the small stairs correctly. You will see that the landing is thinner than the stairs B so you must push your stairs to the edge of the landing that will sit to the wall of your hallway.

You can see on the picture above that I have slid the stairs back to where the landing and the stairs would be flush to the wall and their is a lip at the front. I am not sure why this is there but I think if you wanted to put in a wall under the stairs to support it and change up how the stairs look then this would be the perfect spot for the stairs to rest on the wall. If you dont want to do this lip is not really seen at all anyway.

Once you have added the small stairs B to the landing C you can now see that the small step D will sit on all the other stairs. Please note that the holes go to the outside as these  will take your spindles.

Then you can add your newel post E into the corner ready to take your handrail going both up the stairs and down the stairs.

You can also flip everything around so you can do a left hand return too.

So the end result would be a left hand return..

So there you have it. I hope that all the pictures and the short explaination has helped you with your kit. Don't forget to let me know if there is anything else you would like me to help with.