Sunday, January 9, 2011

Stairs

While I have forbid Steve from starting any new projects (like that will happen :) until we finish some of the current ones (i.e. bathroom, basement bathroom, finishing the final 10% in the dining and living rooms, outside...), we have begun research on interior staircases.
            Our stair layout is currently very poor as the basement stairs come out in our kitchen and therefore use valuable wall space in our already small kitchen.  We access our upstairs stairs (now that sounds weird) from the very back of our kitchen so it never feels like a real upstairs when you have to walk through the kitchen and climb up by the backdoor and dog door. 
            When my whole family visited over Christmas, I got to talking about stairs with my dad (a retired home builder) and sister (old house purist and enthusiast) and we discussed how the stairs could be redesigned.  We figured out (with Steve) that it would be extremely hard if not impossible to flip the stair cases (basement and upstairs are stacked cases) so that at least the upstairs access was in the front of the kitchen and this did not seem do-able.
           Anyways, my dad, sister and I thought it would be really cool to knock into the front bedroom's closet and take part of the front bedroom (currently the baby room) and have a beautiful staircase to upstairs right when you enter the house.  Anyways, Steve quickly nixed this idea (he does not want to lose most of a bedroom for a staircase) and now we are back to the drawing board.
 going upstairs....rather narrow and steep
 stairs to the basement....creepy (although they have since been painted and reinforced in spots) and steep as well


Here are a few helpful websites we have found thus far:
This is what came out when we projected some possible stair configurations
  • this website calculates the rise and run of your stairs based on dimensions that you enter into the calculator on the webpage
  • Link to staircase building code for City of Portland, including exceptions to code if you are modifying a pre-existing staircase

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