In going over some of good- bad- and I won't there jobs I did this year, this was one, I did this summer, that I'll remember.
Got a call from my supplier to call this fellow near me on a stair job. He started out telling me that he had hired a carpenter to some remodeling and stairs. After getting to a point, the carpenter was a no-show. He's in a bind and can I finish--oh boy !. Apparently the stairs originally had walls on both sides that were removed. He wanted the stairs to appear curved so they( I think now the homeowner was the carpenter ) cut the stringers, racked the top half of the length and then put the bottom half back square. Resulting in regular treads on first half and parallelogram treads on the top half. I'd never seen parallelogram treads on a residentual stairs, let alone installed them. They had also removed the center stringer and installed rises and 1' pine treads, and as you walk up the stairs you bounced on every step. I had an idea, but I also called my supplier to stop by to get my list for a price. My supplier also has an engineering degree, but couldn't do the 9-5 40 hr. thing, and I wanted a second opinion on a fix. He thought my idea of using 1 1/16" Oak treads and pinning to risers would work good, since they had built walls under stringers and headers at the center joints, that with my method would make a good strong stair. So I demo'ed ll his stuff and piched it. Generally when stairs make a turn there is a landing or a winder tread, this had neither. The HO had a pile of parts, rail, balusters, but much missing and had a pile of all the wrong fittings.
Well I got skirts, treads, and lower trim on then off to the balcony, before installing the newells, and rail. They had newell posts on balcony area, but all in the wrong places, and lag bolted from below, before drywalling lower ceiling, yea fun to remove. They had also installed laminate flooring that ran to the drywall at the edge of balcony ( did't have a clue how they were going to terminate it. What I did was to install a band board of 1x4, measure in to allow for a landing cap and double taped straight edges down 5/16 under sized from my lay-out. routed it off. Then cut a rabbet on landing cap to overlay the floor. Balcony's are generally layed out to common angles, and fittings are made in these , not his, from stairs it was 56*, 37*, 44* and ended at a 50 something , had to play with everything.
There were times, like every day when I though , what did you get youself into -- then I figured it was just one of life's skill and knowledge tests.
I had borrowed an X girlfriends camera, so I don't know why pics are so bad, maybe it was hexed.
1. full view from the side
2. going up ,showing turn
3.long shot from far side of balcony
4. fun to do top fitting
5. balcony
Roger
One good thing that happened while doing this job, was a neighbor ( around corner 2 houses down ) stopped by a couple times , and wanted me to stop by and look at remodeling his stairs. A nice long, low rise stairs that just begged for a good design and remodeling. That one I started a month later , and really nice was it's 2 miles from home.
Reply With Quote