stairs...

I thought the next logical step in the construction would be to build some stairs... much easier to work on the second floor when I can just walk up there.

First stringer cut and trial-fitted. Stairs are tricky... plenty of measurement mishaps, and I think I made most of them. Take one tread-height off of the first rise... check. Take one riser-thickness off of the last run... nope - that's only for deck stairs where you don't have a riser-board on the last step. The notched-stringers actually went pretty smoothly; the edge boards gave me problems though...

Here are three attempts at the edge boards - the ones that get nailed/bolted to the sides and give a base to nail the stringers to. The first one (foreground) was an inch too short at the toe. The second one (middle) was missing the tread-height on both the top and bottom. The third one (farthest of the three) was just right! I was lucky that the mistake pieces were still long enough to serve as stair treads; turned out to be a pretty inexpensive lesson in measurement and attention.

After I got the shape right... burned and brushed. Note the concrete pattern casually matching up to the stairs...

This is one of those details I'll look at later and smile. Slip-joint rocks where a butt-joint would have sufficed. I tried this with a router table, but it didn't fit to my liking and I returned the platform trim piece to the scrap pile... this final version was cut with a hand saw, hammer, and chisel. I've had plenty of practice with those tools building furnature, and I can cut exactly the shape I want at any angle, any time. ...sometimes the older methods are actually an improvement.

Taking shape. I have to point out one thing in this photo, because it looks so natural as to be un-noticed and forgotten... the edge of the stick-form pattern (the saw-tooth edge in the concrete just above the board on the left) matches the run of the stairs perfectly. I roughed this out on the back side when I was building the forms, and it turns out that I absolutely nailed it!. 

Yeah, that looks just about right. Leaving room for some carved myrtle-wood risers later... (need to find a suiable use for about 500 board feet of myrtle wood that I bought and treated for powder-post beetles at the start of this project... treated with bora-care; time to check for activity from those little destructive buggers.

View from the landing; I probably walked up and down these steps about thirty times just for the fun and novelty of it.

I got a stringer for the next run of stairs cut and fitted just before daylight gave out. And I nailed it on the first shot. I learned the lessons from the first run... progress!

This is another of those hurdles that gives me anxiety and absorbs my thoughts at 2AM... building stairs is a technically-challenging task frought with measurement pitfalls, and it's a good feeling to be successfully makng my way through it. I look forward to someday being able to drop the anxiety and just do these things... I'll get there.