Bricks, Masonry, Asphalt and Concrete - need railings for brick porch/steps

recently had a brick front porch/nine steps built. Wanted wrought iron railings, but price is prohibitive. Am considering vinyl railings, but not sure how they would look against my wood frame house or last. My preferred approach at this point would be to build wood railings. But I do not know the technique to attach posts to the brick. Would appreciate any advice on attaching wood posts to brick.

Adding a railing can be easy, but then again that depends on your definition of easy. There are specifications as well you will need to research in determining the placement of your rails from the side of the porch but long story short you will need to remove a portion of one brick for each rail and install a piece of thread rod into poured cement, let it cure and set up completely before attaching nuts and washers and basically screw on your rail, we are about to do this ourselves in the next few weeks. We are waiting on the cement to cure now. Here is that question asked and answered on HGTV

Q: I need to replace the front porch railing, the stairs are brick and mortar. What is the best way to anchor the newel posts to the brick bottom step
HH: There are a number of ways to anchor the newel posts. It can be done lag screws and lag shields. The shields go in the concrete after the proper-sized hole is drilled, and once the lag screw is installed through the base of the newel post and into the shield, the shield will expand into the concrete and become anchored. Another option is to drill holes into the concrete and install threaded rods then nuts and washers can be used to anchor the newel post to the threaded rod.

That link is http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/chats/article/0,1783,HGTV_3224_1388001,00.html

There are several step by step sites online showing how to do this, just search one of your favorite search engines, I would suggest google as it seems to give me more accurate search matches.

Hope this helps.

Thought I would post a site which shows this type of process, it may help further explain the technique.

http://www.aecinfo.com/1/resourcefile/00/31/23/sdiycc14.htm

Good luck

Thanks for the very helpful info and the weblinks. Wood posts seem to be the way to go and perhaps I can mix wood railing with wrought iron vertical members given the various styles available through stairs.com. I'm checking into the building code for such a project. Thanks again. :)