STAIR BUILDING STEP BY STEP

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by Richard Freudenberger

Tread lightly if you don't use geometry, patience or basic carpentry skills. By Richard Freudenberger

MAKE A POINT SOMETIME to study the stairs in your home. Inthe light of scrutiny, that one piece of construction can change from a taken-for-granted utility to a display of planning and execution that's as close to perfect as you're likely to see under a family roof.

Think of all the elements that could've gone askew: An angle too steep or too shallow, a beam placed just where your pate passes daily, steps that are short, narrow or pitched one way or the other—any of these would make a quick run upstairs seem like a dash through an obstacle course.

Fortunately, others have gone before us and charted the way. And stairs in the great majority of houses don't require the skills of a master builder but rather an appreciation of planning. Once that's established, a circular saw and a few hand tools can work wonders for the careful soul seeking a simple stair to another story.

Some Garden Varieties

An open stairway is just what it implies: It's exposed on one or both sides and uses a balustrade if there are more than two or three steps. Closed stairways are flanked by full or knee walls and use handrails rather than the post-and-banister railing of the open style. Stairs with no backboards, or risers, are called open tread stairways and may or may not be exposed.

For a stair builder, there are further distinctions based on how the treads and risers are fastened to the stair carriages, or stringers.

But the most manageable design uses a cutout, or notched, stringer. The seats for the treads are cut directly into the 2 X 12 carriage planks, making an exaggerated sawtooth pattern in the upper edge. The assembly can be exposed, as in a basement stair, or dressed up with skirtboards —side trim that is fitted to the treads and risers to give a finished look to the structure beneath. It's a good stair for the first-time builder to tackle.

The Flight Plan

The few rules that exist in stair building are based upon a combination of common sense and code compliance. For example, main stairways usually must be 36" wide from wall to wall, but a 42" width is more comfortable. Likewise, minimum headroom—the distance from the nose of the tread to any overhead member-is established at 80", but many house stairs are more generous by 6" or so—and basement steps are shy that by a couple of inches.

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