Breaking bits building a knee wall

When I first moved into the house and was refinishing the floors I removed the banisters from the stairs. The ones at the top of the stairs were not particularly useful because the top 5 steps were missing a good hand railing. The only support would have been to grab the wooden balusters, which just seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

A knee wall is more useful in that spot because then I would be able to attach a long handrail along it going down the stairs. This blog post is about my weekend project of building a knee wall. It doesn't look pretty yet, but the structure is there.

I did my requisite google research about how to build a knee wall before getting started and bought my supplies. 2x4s, a 1x6 oak ledge, and drywall were the main purchases. I also got a dowel to attach the base 2x4 to the former baluster holes. I already had wood screws, drywall screws (thanks to Momma-G), wood glue, joint compound, drywall tape. I ended up buying a new drill because the hand-me-down drill in the picture below wasn't cutting it. I went for a corded one b/c I don't need the mobility associated with battery operated drills, it was cheaper, and I'd like to think it's more environmentally friendly. Somehow in the course of building the wall, I ended up with a bruised knuckle. I should be more careful when using my drill because people will think I spend my weekends punching people or things. I'm a lover, not a fighter.

I did some measurements and got to use my mitre saw to cut the 2x4s to length. I also drilled holes in them for the dowel pieces to line up with the holes in the floor. This picture shows hole 1 of 4. The holes lined up when I flipped the 2x4 onto the holes shown in the floor.

When I was cutting the 2x4 so that the wall would be almost 3ft tall, I decided to duct taping the 3 beams together for making the final cut so that they would all be the same height. Then I screwed the 2x4s all together and added the dowels resulting in this frame:

It was at this point that I broke the bit, which I mentioned in a previous post, so it will forever be in this wall. Word of warning - bits get hot! I secured this into the wall and the floor with 2½ inch screws in addition to the dowel pieces.

Then I cut the oak ledge to size and secured it with a lot of wood glue. After I let it dry I used some shorter wood screws to secure it from underneath... don't want those screws to show, so be sure to do this before putting on the drywall. I was a little paranoid about the sturdiness of the wall so I decided to use all pieces of the 2x4s that I could and added some extra support like so:

The last part that I was able to do over the weekend was add drywall to the sides and spackle over the screws. Here's the current status of the wall!