Staircases are funny.  They look rather simple but contain a lot of interesting parts with interesting names.  My two favorites are "balusters" and "newels".  Newels are the fancy posts that one can find at the end of the staircases, while balusters are thinner and comprise most of the staircase.  Typically you'll have ten or more balusters in between a newel.

Now that you know what a newel is, we are currently redoing our staircase.  We found a contractor who specializes in staircases and he worked with us to come up with a parts list for Stairwarehouse.com.  They have some beautiful pieces on their web site and I highly recommend them despite the mishap - which was entirely our fault.

We decided to do red oak for the treads (to match our flooring) and Brazilian cherry for the railing and newels.  The balusters are iron.  For the newels, we went all out and purchased gorgeous intricately carved box newels.

The newels are hand crafted by an Amish craftsman in Ohio and when they arrived were as gorgeous as we expected.  We couldn't wait to install them.  When our contractor arrived, he took one look at them and exclaimed

They're too big.

Huh!  Weren't you right there when we measured all of this!  Unfortunately, because they are hand crafted and custom to order we cannot return them.  Stairwarehouse did give us a great discount on replacement newels, but we are now stuck with $3,000 in newels we cannot use.

I am of course trying to sell them through numerous channels.  My hopes are that one of the builders we work with can use them.  The reality is they are too big for most homes.

When we started this remodel, the goal was to make our home nice enough that we will not want to leave it for some time.  However, we now have these newels to remind us that there are just some things about our home that will never work.

Therefore, the true price of these newels is not $3,000.  They are two million dollar newels.  It will take approximately two million dollars to buy a home large enough that we can redo the staircase with these newels.  So we'd better start saving!