Way, way in the back

You should read part one first.

Before I started the stair-building project, there was a tiny little 3x3 platform outside the doorwall with a set of crappy little stringer stairs, the groundward end of which were slowly sinking into the dirt on which they had been carelessly laid. The platform was less than three years old when I started this job, and was in pretty good shape, considering. Still, it couldn’t have been the result of more than a couple hours of hasty work in the last few days of construction on the house.

A pathetic excuse for a set of stairs, when they were new

Demolition took an entire day, since the two posts on which the platform rested turned out to be the tops of two telephone-pole-sized pieces of lumber (or so it seemed to me as I dug for them). For anyone considering doing work like this, I would advise waiting until the ground dries up a bit and obtains a consistency slightly firmer than cold custard, which is what it was like as I dug for those posts. Trying to pull them upward kept resulting in me actually sinking further into the holes with them. If you’re wondering whatever happened to Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound”, I can confirm that it was waiting in the ground outside my back door, and was released as I pulled out two six-foot lengths of fourbuhfour with about eighty pounds of concrete clinging to each like a couple of giant caveman Popsicles.

Note that because the entire final product, by virtue of it being a set of stairs, needed to be close to the ground, a lot the construction occurred at a completely subterranean level. So the next step was a general excavation and leveling stage to get to the point where I could actually start construction at a baseline several inches below the level of the surrounding ground. There are two truisms I took away from this project, and one of them is that you should never ever underestimate the amount of dirt that’s going to come out of any given hole you’re thinking about digging. It doesn’t matter how small you think the hole is: it’s going to produce more dirt than you think (The other truism, if you’re curious, is that the single hardest tool to keep track of on a job like this is a pencil. Just do yourself a favor and bring a bunch of them).

The blank slate

You want to know something that’s scary to do? Try taking a circular saw to your siding. That was the next step in the project. I knew a roofer a few years ago who convinced me of the insidious destructive power of water combined with gravity, and as the little vinyl chips from the cut were hitting my glasses, all I could think of was the outstanding balance on my mortgage. Worse still, I had to predict where all the stairs would be sitting when the entire project was finished, and cut the siding to shape. Afterwards I re-flashed the sheathing (bottom up, of course) with a sturdy vinyl flashing material I found at Lowe’s. I’ve never worked with the aluminum stuff, but I imagine that the vinyl was a lot easier and safer to work with, as I hardly lost any blood in the process of putting it up.

My design called for one end of the stairs to be anchored to the foundation, and the other end to be resting on a beam that was fairly normal except for the fact that the entire thing needed to be almost completely underground. For the foundational support I used a piece of quarter-inch angle iron to form a lintel against the house, and secured it with six massive concrete anchors rated to withstand 1500 downward pounds of force apiece (and 1700 outward pounds). So if you happen to weigh 9000 pounds, you can walk up my stairs safely (assuming you can walk). My philosophy, at least when working on my own stuff, can be accurately described as “when in doubt, overdesign”.

Once that was done, I dug holes for the concrete piers that would support the main beam. I fairly arbitrarily picked twenty inches as the diameter of the circular holes I dug, as this was a number that allowed me to have one of the holes centered about sixteen inches out from the house and not be digging and pouring concrete right up against the foundation. Note that the circular details on each level of the deck design mean that the deck joists get shorter and shorter as they move out from the house, so the holes are offset from each other.

Oh, and if you look at the photo below and think that the amount of dirt that’s laying there doesn’t look all that unreasonable, you should know that when I first dig the holes I got down to about 30 inches before needing to stop for the day, but after a little googling, I found that the code in my county actually called for all footings to be set 36 inches deep to get below the frost line, so I had to go out and dig some more after having cleared away the dirt from the first part of the dig. In other words, the amount of dirt shown in that photo was produced by the bottom six inches of two twenty-inch diameter holes. Remember what I said about being surprised by how much dirt I ended up with? Holy crap did I ever have a lot of dirt.

An extraordinary quantity of dirt

Next up was to actually pour the footers. This took about 300 pounds (not quite four 80-pound bags) of dry concrete per pier. The bottom 12 inches or so of the piers simply filled the entire 20-inch diameter of the holes, but from there on up I used 8-inch cardboard forming tubes to form nice shapely columns. I sunk four pieces of #2 rebar about 32 inches down into the tubes while they were still wet, making sure their tops were just below the surface of the concrete, and also set j-bolts into the centers for anchorage later, making sure about ¾” of the threads appeared above the surface.

It was quite a challenge to build wooden frames to hold the tubes in position while they dried, since even the topmost surface of the the piers themselves, in order to support the beam and joists, all had to be pretty far underground. This meant that the holding frame couldn’t really be built from above, as you would normally do in a situation like this. In the end, a friend made the suggestion to just build the framework from the bottom of the hole up, and then snap the wood off when the concrete was dry. This worked pretty well.

I wish I could show some photos of this whole operation (especially that last bit) as it was carried out, but I had at this point become frustrated with how long this project was taking, so I kind of rushed though the whole pier-formation operation by working late into the night for two days straight. I think this was the point at which the neighbors started talking.

A little further excavation was required to form a channel between the piers in which the main beam could sit. A nice layer of landscaping cloth over the whole thing afterwards brought me to that moment in the project when you first look at it and can imagine it done. As it turned out, my imagination was playing tricks on me. I wasn’t even halfway through at this point.

After the piers were dry and ready I embarked upon a surprisingly long and difficult lumber-acquisition process. In an effort to save the cost of renting a truck, I just used my little SUV to bring this lumber home. I got about half of it on the first trip and was so wiped out that I had to give up on making the second trip. This worked out pretty well, because it saved me the trouble of having to be super-accurate at that part of the project when you sit and look at it with a pad and pencil in your hand (if you can find the damnable thing) and pre-shop for everything you’ll need.

The first and most important piece of lumber put into the project was the main beam, a pressure-treated length of 4x6 rated for “ground contact” (which means that more of the preservative gunk has been baked into the wood, up to a rating of .40 ACQ, whatever that means). This rested on top of two metal brackets designed specifically for this purpose, which attached to the piers with nuts and washers on the exposed j-bolts and had channels above for the beam. This was the only ground-contact-rated piece of lumber I used, since it was the only one that ended up being far enough underground that it would actually be in contact with the ground. Even so, the ground it would up being in contact with was just gravel, so hopefully that will drain well enough that it won’t even really count as ground contact.

The project is finally (as well as literally) off the ground

As you can see in the pictures above, I was trying out the fit for the joists, just to see where they would end up sitting. It worked out pretty well. The bottoms of the joists wound up being about 3 inches off the ground. In the finished project, they sit about an inch off the gravel fill that I used under the whole thing. Doing the fill of the entire channel in which the beam sat and an additional two inches or so everywhere else took an amazing amount of gravel. I went to buy it once and got twelve bags, which wound up being about half of what I needed. I had to go back. This was frustrating in that the gravel fill is really only there to assuage my neuroses. I didn’t want to spend the rest of the time I own these stairs (potentially the rest of my life) thinking about the underside of them not being clean and well-ordered. I’m kind of nuts that way.

A big challenge was to ensure that the ledger board was exactly level with the joists that sit on the beam, a task at which I was not wholly successful. I used big 2-inch washers to keep the ledger board about an eighth of an inch from the foundation, and used long (3-inch) concrete screws to attach it.

Once the beam and ledger were in place, I got started with building the frame for the first level of the stairs. I don’t know exactly when I developed the predjudice, but I’m not a big fan of nails. I went through like nine boxes (50 each) of 1 ¾” screws building this project. I used standard brackets to hold everything together, and put cross-members in every few feet. For the first and second layers, the second-farthest-out joist needed to be doubled up to provide both a place to set the second layer and a place to put one end of the eventual stair tread (this is called the “nailer” in the “stacked frame” diagram shown in part one). I just used big brass wood screws and a bunch of washers to keep the two members separated by about a quarter inch.

Once the frame was built I used a piece of ¾ inch wide aluminum stock (an eighth of an inch thick or so) to fashion a trammel that I could use to trace out the circular details without the whole thing stretching and throwing off the accuracy of the circles. I ended up having to create a little half-cross-members to screw one end of the trammel into at the correct location at each level. It occurred to me only after I had been working on the first-level frame for a few hours that I was going to have to “skin” the stairs at every level as I went up, since the trammel could only accurately mark out the circles to be cut (both on the outside and the inside edges of each stair tread) if the next layer was not yet built.

I used a mélange of products for that “skin” on the stair frame, and by this time I had made up my mind that I wanted to use a synthetic decking material. I also wanted what I think of as a classical stair arrangement where the horizontal deck material forms an overhang of an inch or so over the stair kick. In order to do this I needed a material that was shaped like plain old lumber decking. Unfortunately, most of the synthetic deck materials out there have some kind of hollow structure or odd channeled bottom, which is why most decks built with that stuff have skirt-boards that cover up the ends of the of the lumber. Some people think that this makes these decks look modern but to my eyes, they all look like they just arrived from a time-warp straight out of the seventies.

The only synthetic decking choice out there that’s shaped the way I wanted is called Veranda, and is currently sold at Home Depot. This stuff is pretty good, if a little expensive. It’s reversible, with one side having a wood-like texture gouged into it, and the other having a sort of finely-ridged texture for traction. Unfortunately, Veranda doesn’t include the big wide skirt boards that I needed for the stair kicks in their product line. For those, I went to Lowe's and got skirtboards from a different product line which I think is called Choicedeck, and is a Weyerhauser product. I wanted to use the plainer ridged face of the deck boards, but the skirt boards didn’t have another acceptable surface, and had a woody texture. So to make the look of this thing a little more coherent, I used the wood-textured side of the deck boards.

The manufacturer of Veranda recommends that you pre-countersink. Myself, I just drilled pilot holes when I was working near the end of a piece, since the stuff splits with surprising ease. Sinking the screw below the level of the surface results in a little mushroom of plastic material being thrown up. Afterwards I just went along with a hammer and pounded all the little mushrooms flat. In the end you can see where the screws went but not the screws themselves. It looks pretty natural.

Like watching “Hellraiser” in reverse, isn’t it?

The trickiest part of each level was the structure I used to turn the circle on the stair kick. I forgot to take any pictures of the process until the second time I did it, though, so all the pictures of this process are at either the second or third levels.

First, I angle-cut the ends of a piece of lumber to form an endpiece for the joists. This was most easily done by just laying a short piece of lumber over top of the joists at the right position, making the marks on the bottom of the board, and then measuring the angle and cutting accordingly. This was easy for the joists where the turn had first started, but got much trickier where the turn was finishing, and the angle needed to be much more acute. My table saw doesn’t cut at really acute angles, as I’m guessing most do not. You’d need a really big adjustable mitre box to keep those cuts straight with a regular saw. Since I didn’t have one of those, I had to go with a sort of catch-as-catch-can method, which resulted in slightly less than perfect (read: pretty crappy) cuts. Even after doing this like six times, I still don’t have a decent solution for it. Once the cuts were made, I secured the end pieces to the joints with big-ass brass wood screws.

the frame before and after adding the endpieces

After the endpieces were in place on the joists (and this only had to be done for the joists where the turn was occurring), I cut pieces of lumber (typically 2x4 stock) to the same length as the endpieces. Then, holding that piece of lumber exactly against the endpiece, I used the trammel to mark the portion of the circle that appeared on that board. I then took the board to my scrollsaw (I bought a cheap one just for this project, but a jigsaw with a long blade would have worked just as well) and cut along the line to produce what I called a “roller cleat” to attach to the endpiece. I needed two of these for each endpiece, so I used the first cleat to trace a line onto another piece of lumber of similar length and repeated the process. The cleats were then just screwed onto the endpieces to form the desired curve. Note that for the thicker cleats, I used a paddle bit to create holes in the sides of them so I could use normal-sized screws to do the attachment. I’m sure Norm Abrams would have a word for that, but I’ll be damned if I know what it would be.

The endpieces and cleats

After this was done, completing the stair kick was a simple matter of rolling the skirtboard out onto the joist-ends, cleats, and front of the outermost joist. The cleats allowed me to put screws on a nice even spacing, since with this arrangement you pretty much have your choice as to where to put screws. As I did this, the entire structure firmed up to a degree that I found astonishing, resulting in an incredibly strong curved composite member that I couldn’t move or flex in any way.

Rolling out the skirtboard. Clamps are very helpful here.

A couple of notes about this technique: First, the end of the outermost joist had to be shaped a bit to smoothly fit the curve. I did this with a hand plane. Second, it was a bit tricky to cut the skirtboard to length before starting to attach it, and it turned out to be critical to get the width of the skirtboard correct. For one of my levels, I cut the skirtboard a little too wide and then foolishly attached it (because cutting it to width was just ridiculously difficult to do by myself, and I didn’t want to do it again). After this I realized that this would cause the deck boards to sit on top of the skirtboard instead of my carefully-crafted and super-strong curved frame. I corrected this with a hand plane as well, but it took a long time, a lot of effort, and made a giant mess.

One nice thing about building stairs this way is that it gets easier as you go up. Fewer joists are needed at each level, and the very top level doesn’t require the double-joist at the second to last position like the lower levels. I got lucky at the top. When I was done the top of the frame was dead-ass level, the deck boards fit perfectly between the top ledger and the bottom of the doorwall, and every level of the stairs sat within an eighth of an inch of the cuts I had made in the siding some five months earlier.

By the end of the summer I was just burnt out on tackling jobs I had no idea how to do, so I had a siding company come out and do the J-channeling work around the stairs. This went pretty seamlessly, as evidenced by the fact that I never met anyone from the company in person. I just made a couple phone calls and then, one evening a few days later when I was out there standing on the stairs, I realized that all the J-channel had been installed. “Guess I’d better pay that bill when it comes” was my next thought when I recovered from my surprise.

The concept…	The reality. Like the concept, but wetter.

So in the end it took all I had this summer to just do the stairs for the patio. Maybe next year I can get started on the patio itself.

And so it has come to this. My blog postings are now, apparently, a sub-annual event. Increasingly, I feel the urge to blog more about my work around the house and less about, well, anything else.

I don’t think I was as productive this year as last, but oddly enough I myself may not be the best authority on the subject of how productive I was. In actuality I don’t remember anything that I did before I got started on the patio stairs. I might have been the President of the United States prior to getting started on that project, for all I know. It was an all-consuming activity that ate up very nearly every free waking hour I managed to scrape up during my spring/summer project period. I feel like that guy who dreamt he was a butterfly. Or was I a butterfly who dreamt he was a man engaged in an interminable stair-building operation? Truly, who can say?

But first some background. The project I selected this year, not realizing what I was getting myself into, was the installation of a backyard patio, or at least as much of it as could reasonably be accomplished in the time I had. So during the lull after the fall/winter project cycle, when I could no longer stand being in the basement laying tile and whatnot (which probably should have been a blog entry of its own, alas), I procured some landscape-layout software and got to work giving shape to my ideas. The package I selected was written by a company called Punch!. They sell a suite of modular software, with different packages apparently just representing a different set of plug-ins to the same basic program. I believe the package I selected was called “Master Landscape Pro”, a banal-sounding title that ought to teach marketing people everywhere that merely surrounding a word with superlatives does not, in fact, make for an exciting product name.

Now, this piece of software is no AutoCad, but it had the advantage of being about $249,930 cheaper than AutoCad, and after a few hours up the learning curve I was surprised at how useful it turned out to be. It allowed me to get ideas out of my head and onto paper, where it became clear that some of my ideas were stupid. The visualization tools gave me what turned out to be a remarkably accurate idea of the scale of what I wanted to do. This is where I began to realize that I was probably in trouble. Again.

The grand design

Of all the mistakes I made on this project (and, as usual, they are legion), the worst by far was the trip to the local home and garden expo. It’s one of those events that my wife and I go to every year in spite of the fact that it’s really sort of the same every time. Nowadays when we go, the most common thing we find ourselves saying is “yeah, that’s still really nice”, usually followed by “and we still can’t afford it”. Walking around the landscaping part of the show this year, though, a funny idea began to form in my head. What if I was able to just buy the patio? I started to get really psyched about the idea of moving on to other stuff this year while someone else hefted the damn shovel for a change. By the time we left the show, I was carrying a lot of brochures.

I selected a subset of four landscaping companies to bring out and have look over my plan. Scheduling these meetings, rushing home from work for them, and repeatedly taking the time to tell person after person about my plan taught me one thing: landscaping services currently exist in what is very much a seller’s market. Of the four companies I had come out, one made what I eventually concluded was a good faith effort to produce an estimate that I thought was really high. Two never even bothered to call me back. The last one did the nastiest thing of all: he offered me a “ballpark” price that I was totally ready to accept, but then came back with an actual estimate that was really close to the first guy’s. Overall I was left with the subtle impression that landscapers really don’t like people who come up with their own plans. Or at least that there are too many people with no idea what they want but a big stack of money they’re willing to spend that they don’t bother with geeky dudes who show them an entire presentation on the big-screen.

But each of them had one thing in common when they looked at my plan. They all feared the stairs. They’d start by asking what they were made of. I’d respond that I hadn’t made up my mind yet, but they would be either wood or synthetic decking. Each of them tried to convince me to do them in brick or some other masonry instead. When I told them that I wanted wood (or an equivalent), since everything else in the plan was made of stone, they then immediately asked whether I really wanted the circular details, to which I would respond in the affirmative. They would then look very thoughtful and say “hmmmm” in a way that sounded extremely expensive.

I thought maybe the first guy was just being difficult. When the second guy was the same way I grilled him harder about why it was such a problem. By the third I was pretty much just openly combative about insisting that I wanted the plan as it was shown, but I was keenly aware that there was an issue here.

The problem, as it turned out, was the three-foot radius of the circular edges. Each of the landscapers looked at that particular detail and threw up their hands, saying that they’d have to bring in a carpenter for work like that. In due course, I came to know why they were so afraid, but that is the subject of a future entry.

A subject of fear and loathing among landscapers

The reason I describe this entire episode as a mistake is that, for several days during the process, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be the one doing this work. When that deal fell through, all I’d managed to do was to distract myself by thinking about the other projects I would have been freed up to do, and make myself aware of how hard it would be now that I would have to do it myself. Lesson: on a job like this you’re really not better off getting educated beforehand. Next time I’m just going to stick with my tried-and-true formula of just bumbling ahead and dealing with whatever difficulty comes when it comes.

I struggled for a long time with a way to build the stairs as they were shown on my fanciful drawing. The designs I kept coming up with involved like nine separate posts each sunk into concrete. Turns out that, like the landscapers who hated the design, I’m not really a carpenter either.

I finally found the needed inspiration in a book called “Lowe’s complete patio and deck book” (Lowe’s publisher and the Punch! Software guys probably need to get their marketing people together). I had bought the book for a completely different purpose a while ago, and picked it up to look through it for an idea. On page 123 I saw the following illustration, and in that one instant I also saw the entirety of the remainder of the design.

eureka!

The caption for the diagram tells us that the technique, called Stacked Frame by the authors, is “less efficient in its use of materials”, which turned out to be an almost comical understatement. In the end, nearly 250 linear board-feet of pressure-treated 2x8 material went into the frame for this monstrosity. That much lumber, had I used a less insane design, should have been enough to deck over about half the yard, but in this case covers a footprint of less than six feet by ten. I’m always surprised at what I’ll eventually find acceptable after struggling for any kind of idea for a long time. On the plus side, the use of materials is slightly more frugal than it would have been had I somehow found a way to make each level of the steps out of one large slab of solid wood. Also on the plus side, the design resulted in a set of stairs that will probably outlast the house. You could seriously drive a tank up into my house on these things.

The project spanned from mid-April right up through mid-September. In the next post: the details!