I knew all along that getting stairs into the Queen Anne rowhouse would be a challenge. The stair holes were positioned in a place that wouldn’t fit a regular straight staircase. The original kit may have come with stairs that turned a corner, and apparently Houseworks used to sell stairs like these because I’ve seen them a few times on eBay. But the only half scale stairs readily available now are the straight ones, so bashing was my only option.
From looking at the photo of the old Houseworks stairs and at the stairs in my own house, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do but wasn’t sure how to go about it. I got as far as cutting the staircase into two pieces, back in September, before my head started to hurt.
So I put them aside until my parents came to visit last week. My dad is good at figuring out this sort of thing, and he knows how to use power tools! Here’s the basic design we came up with.
Initially I cut the staircase into two pieces: 6 stairs at on the top piece and 7 stairs on the bottom piece. But I was concerned about headroom, so we ended up making a 2-step landing and removing one additional stair from the bottom section.
The stairs were easy to cut with a miter box. For all of the other pieces, my dad used the scary circular saw. (I didn’t take any pictures of that, too busy covering my ears…)