Tag: landing

Back Basement Steps Drain

November 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Mario, our concrete mason, is planning to form and pour the steps and landing outside the back basement door soon. One important feature of the landing is a drain for rain and snow. I’m a bit paranoid about flooding in the basement. I’ve known too many people get water in their basement and cause thousands of dollars of damage to half-ass the drainage when we have the opportunity to do it the right way now. The good news is that even without any weeping system, the old basement never flooded, despite some heavy rainfall. The bad news is that was before we dug it down by a foot, and we’ve definitely had water at that level, though mostly due to bad gutters. I have extensive plans for storm water management with our house, but most of them haven’t been implemented yet.

Catch basin drain

Catch basin drain

Two of the people I know that have had flooded basements live in houses very similar to ours, with a basement door to the outside and steps up to grade. In both cases, water coming in from the back door was a major cause of the flooding, so I want to be extra careful with ours. First, the landing outside the back door is going to be a couple inches lower than the basement floor. Second, I’m using a 6″ catch basin style drain that ties directly to our interior weeping system. The advantage of this style drain is that any debris that gets past the grate settles to the bottom of the drain rather than going down the pipe and causing clogs or problems with the sump pump. Using a 6″ drain means that it will be more difficult for leaves and other debris to clog the grate. Third, rather than center the drain in the landing I put it towards the retaining wall, so that when Mario pours the landing it will slope away from the house. Doing that math on square footage of the stairs and landing, this system will easily handle the 3″ per hour 100-year storm water rate for Chicago as long as the drain doesn’t get completely clogged, and this drain should resist clogging.

Area drain installed

Area drain installed (looking out from basement)

The installation itself was pretty straightforward. We dug out the landing a bit and took out the old concrete threshold at the footing level of the basement door so we could run a trench to the weeping system. A bit of pipe, some stone, and the drain itself went in with a bit of test fitting and trench re-grading.

Ready for stairs and landing

Ready for stairs and landing

Mario came out and put in more stone to prep the area for the steps and the landing. We got some snow over the weekend and a holiday coming up, but hopefully we can get them formed and poured soon.

Landing Subfloor

August 21, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Normally I wouldn’t dedicate a whole post to a little section of subfloor, but the landing turned out to be a bit involved. When I started building the and fitting the stringers I realized that the landing was wonky. It was ¼” too tall and it wasn’t square. To compensate for being too tall, I decided to use half-inch plywood subfloor instead of ¾” OSB. However, ½” is pretty thin for subfloor, so I devised a scheme for fitting sections of ¾” OSB in between the framing members, glued to the underside of the plywood (and to the framing) to add strength and thickness.

Test fitting OSB

Test fitting OSB

If the landing had not been out of square, this would have been pretty straightforward: just cut some rectangles to fit and done deal. However, given the out of squareness, everything was parallelograms. I’ve learned not to measure things any more than I have to. Measuring introduces more inaccuracy than it eliminates. Instead I put the OSB on top of the opening (generally lining up one edge) and drew the shape from below. Then I cut it out along the lines with the circular saw and fit it into place.

It worked fairly well, though I discovered after I had glued and screwed down the plywood (though thankfully not before it had dried) that one piece that fit between the stair stringers would not fit in from below because I sistered 2x4s to the stringers. I had to unscrew the corner of the plywood on top and slide it in (actually I had to do this three times because it kept falling through). Finally, once everything was in place and the glue was setting, I put in about 7,000 screws.

Landing subfloor installed

Landing subfloor installed

In one section the OSB was squeaking when I walked on the landing. I considered that it might go away once the glue set, but rather than take the chance I used a long 2×4 to press the underside of the OSB up against the subfloor and tightened all the screws. I left it that way until the glue set and now it’s all feeling solid and squeak-free. With this done I can work on the second run of stairs up to the second floor.

Stair Stringer Struggles

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Our stair stringers were delivered and I set to work building the first run up to the landing. We’re using 14″ LSL stringers up to the landing because it has to span ten feet above the basement stairs. The stairs will be 42″ wide so there are three stringers, all notch cut. I considered doing an enclosed stringer, but I wanted the treads exposed on the side so we can have a wooden railing with iron balisters, plus the center stringer has to be notch cut anyway, so for consistency I notched all three. I also reinforced with a 2×4 glued and screwed to each one, per manufacturer recommendations.

Stringers installed

Stringers installed

 

I used stair gauges on a carpenters square to mark the cuts. All of my cuts were exactly accurate the first time, the stringers fit in place precisely the way they were supposed to, and they were perfectly level and aligned with one another. The only reason it took me three weeks is because I was admiring how flawless it all was. Eh heh, heh, ugh. No. As I continue to discover, I am not a very good carpenter. I made systemic mistakes, had flaws in my original plan, and spent most of the last few weeks trimming and shimming until the stringers approached a semblance of what I originally had in mind.

Let me run down the, uh, opportunities for improvement I encountered. Firstly, my original model had a flaw that in retrospect to everything else wound up being fairly minor. I made several important measurements that accidentally included the thickness of the risers and treads. In the end I had to make some field adjustments. I also had to slope the back of one of the stringers because the landing is slightly crooked at one end. I almost managed to cut one of the stringers nearly two feet shorter than the others, but fortunately realized my mistake before I had caused catastrophic damage.

The more major issue I didn’t actually figure out until I had been scratching my head at the stringers for a week, trying to figure out why the backs of each step weren’t in line. It turned out I had made the same mistake I’ve now made on multiple other occasions, which is forgetting that the house is totally wonky. The opening to the basement stairs is bordered by a doubled floor joist on one end. I used that edge as the basis for building the landing, and the landing as the basis for the stairs. As it turns out, that floor joist is not quite perpendicular to the outside wall, something I should have realized after all my subfloor frustrations.

Shim shimmery

Shim shimmery

As a result, the landing is not square (like, at all). I have built yet another parallelogram. When I carefully and exactly laid out the stairs to the landing so that the stringers fit, they were skewed to one another. I wound up cutting two of the stringers a bit shorter to compensate, barely fitting them against the landing without sticking down (one may be protruding by a sixteenth, but it’s close enough).

Even after that correction I wound up going back and forth, trimming and shimming an eighth here and there until my levels and measurements started to coalesce around the goal. I’m pretty sure upwards of eighty percent of the edges have had some form of adjustment. As it stands I still have a couple of steps that need some tweaking before they’re acceptable. It’s been a bit of a slog, to the point that I’ve re-written this post multiple times over the last few weeks as the situation evolved. The good news is that I didn’t ruin my expensive engineered lumber, the stairs will be as close to perfect as I know how to make them, and hopefully I’ve learned enough lessons that the remaining stair framing will go more smoothly.

Stair Landing

July 11, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated, and I can’t say that we’ve gotten a lot done in the meantime. Between the new baby, Sarah having hernia surgery and accompanying recovery, and a break in momentum I’ve struggled to regain, we just haven’t gotten much done. The sense of stagnation is worsened by the flurry of work going on next door. In the last two months they’ve torn down the garage, dug down the basement and poured a new floor, re-shingled the roof, installed steel beams in the basement and first floors, new front and back porches, and completely framed the interior! We’re comforting ourselves by noting the things they did poorly, but it’s still tough when we’re not making much progress.

The focus at the moment remains the first floor stairs, specifically the landing. I spent a lot of time over the last few weeks staring into space on the first floor and then checking back to the revised plans. It’s one thing to have dimensions figured out and another to actually put hammer to nail, or impact driver to screw, as the case may be.

First floor landing

First floor landing

I started by building the corner support column, but the studs were depressingly wonky despite clamps and effort, so I took it apart and re-did it better. The parts that I struggled with the most were the points where the cross members met. I want everything to be supported well since it will be bearing the weight of the stairs, but that meant some complex corner joints. I wound up buying some brackets and joist hangers to reinforce everything, and the end product is very sturdy.

The stringers are on back order until the end of the month, so I plan to fill the intervening time by completing some of my unfinished projects and by framing out the coat closet and the rest of the wall at the back of the kitchen.

Stair Planning

May 15, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We’ve got two parallel tracks for the next little while: framing the first floor and the mechanical room plumbing. For now I’m working on the framing. My friend Matt B. will be down tomorrow and Friday to help work on the house, so we’ll be tackling the opening for the stairs in the first floor. In order to be ready I had to go back over the stair calculations, re-measure everything and come up with the final plan and position of the stairs. The stairs are extremely complicated because everything has ripple effects and there are some tight constraints.

Stair Planning

Stair planning

For example, the first floor stairs will go straight up to a landing, turn right 90° and go up the remainder. The bottom of that landing needs to be more than 80″ above the floor so that we can put the stairs down to the basement underneath it. The stairs from the second floor to the attic are above the first floor stairs. Those stairs have a landing directly above the first floor stair landing. We need at least 80″ from the top of the first floor landing to the bottom of the second floor landing plus another 80″ from the top of that landing up to the roofline, and there needs to be a consistent rise and run to the stairs to allow them to get to the correct height at the correct place.

To further complicate things, the brick foundation is thicker than the frame walls, so the finished first floor wall will be 9″ from the finished basement wall. In order to have the minimum 36″ stair width going down to the basement, the stairs above them must be wider, which means the landing must be wider and deeper, and the stairs from the landing to the second floor have that much less space to go up the remaining distance because they can’t go through the LVL beam we just put in. Despite all of that, we did have some play in where the stairs could go front-to-back. Moving them back makes the front bedroom on the second floor bigger, but the coat closet, pantry, and walk-in closet in the master suite smaller. We eventually figured it out.

First floor stair opening

First floor stair opening

Despite the stick drawing of the stairs, I did account for the head room under the stairs after stringers and drywall. Everything checks out, but it’s very close to the 6′ 8″ minimum height. I’d really like to have more clearance, not just for tall people but for moving furniture, but unfortunately there’s no good way to fit more in without building a dormer in the attic above the stairwell, something we really don’t want to do.

The stairs from the first floor to the second will be 42″ wide with 11″ treads (including a 1″ bullnose). From the floor to the landing they’ll rise 7 ⅝” per step, and from the landing to the second floor they’ll rise 8″. The stairs to the attic and basement will have an 8″ rise and a 10″ tread. We’ll build the stairs from framing lumber (rimboard for the stringers, OSB for the risers and treads), and eventually cover them with finishing treads and risers that match our floors.