Stairs

My wife thinks that I have a lot of projects going because I'm unorganized and scatterbrained. But this isn't the case at all. I try to keep a number of projects going so I have choice. I love working on our new home and so I make sure that I have jobs for sunny days and rainy days. I have jobs that require a lot of time and little time, some that cost a lot, some are cheap, some involve a lot of new learning and some do not and so on.

One of the jobs on my list was the basement stairs. These were sketchy at best even after I put in some temporary supports. The steps themselves are old thin planks and the rest of it was an odd collection of whatever wood the previous owners had laying around. They really needed to be replaced if I was going to create a useful space in the basement for future projects (woodshop) and storage.

I realized that the stairs were going to be hard, I had never built stairs before and had no illusions about them. I knew it would take some planning. I had taken down some basic measurements and bought a pair of 2x10x8' boards for the stringers and a pair of 2x8x8' boards for the steps.

Now these weren't going to be any ordinary stairs. The fieldstone foundation wall is not a flat vertical surface but bulges out because of the large stones used towards the middle/bottom. Also the waste pipe exits the house along that wall and so this pipe must go through the stairs. This meant that one of the stringers would have to rest on the footer (again, not flat) and one would rest on an existing concrete landing (not square with non plumb sides). This can be hard to understand in text and pictures wouldn't really help. I'll simplify: it was hard.

I won't lie to you, the two stringers are not precisely parallel even now that the stairs are done. But the solution was to keep "trimming" the stringer that rested on the footing. I'm wary of trimming so I decided that good was good enough and we moved onto stairs. There's probably way too much metal in these wooden stairs but I wanted something secure for my weight and so there were a lot of 4" deck screws used :-).

All in all, Tom and I are proud, though it took a total of about 12 hours to build, it is a vast improvement over the former stairs and it was a great learning experience.





You'll notice that they're pretty steep. They're steeper than the original stairs and that's because I was tired of hitting my head on the floor joists. So its steep on purpose to allow someone of my height to walk up the stairs without stooping.