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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

I've actually built a few staircases, and it's a ton harder than it even sounds here. In fact, there's apparently carpentry competitions and building a stairway to code is the grand finale.

The way he does it, with the angle brackets? That's the easiest way, and by far the weakest. The strongest way is to notch out 2x12's (ideally at least 3, with one in the middle). Oh, and no step can be more than 1/8" difference in rise vs any other stair. This much harder, though.

Combine this with the math to know how many steps you need, and what angle the stairs need to lean overall (this one he touches on), and it's a real pain. Fail, and people get hurt. Your body is pretty sensitive to stairs being perfect.

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A dirty secret (?) is that a lot of the stairways you encounter are not built to code, either because they were built before current codes were put into place or because they were modified after inspection. A common practice is for certain required elements to be included in a way that makes them easy to remove. My girlfriend pointed out an instance of that to me recently — if you looked closely you could see that a handrail (the round bar you can hold onto while you walk on the stairs) had been mounted to the guardrail (the panel that makes it impossible to fall off the stairs sideways) and then removed. She said it was probably added to pass inspection because the guardrail, which was a very beautiful metal design, did not technically qualify as a handrail. Either the stairs failed inspection and the contractor temporarily fixed it up by adding the handrail, or more likely, the designer anticipated the inspection issue and included a cheap handrail for the owner (or more likely the contractor) to remove after inspection. Some people welcome the challenge of designing to code, but some people just resent it and circumvent it whenever they can.

Don't forget stairs that land on surface that is sloped from one side of the stairs to the other. What height should that bottom step be? Will the inspector measure both sides? Do you shoot for the middle being right on and each side being a bit too high and a bit too low?

Watch the height on the first and last steps. The middle ones are the "easy" ones.

In bigger cities there are companies that only frame stairs. It is amazing to watch them - they can do it in their sleep. I watched one crew finish up some complex stairs in less time than our framing crew would have spent making a game plan.

There is detail in everything and until you've done that job you really don't notice it.

I've heard the "real fun" in stairmaking is spiral staircases where the radius changes throughout the staircase...

They should do a tiebreaker/encore where the stair is also to be used by an achondroplastic dwarf with a stride length of 28".

That requires some futzing with the comfort formulas, and still trying to make that work with code and average-height people.

It sounds like it would be far easier to pour concrete steps instead? Gravity will take care of making each step perfectly horizontal, at least.

Making either perfectly horizontal isn't even the hard part, but concrete steps take a LOT longer, if you can believe it. You have to build a wooden box to pour into, and you can only pour once (new concrete does NOT stick to dry concrete).

I did a concrete landing for these steps, which wasn't too bad, but my next door had his front steps re-poured by actual professionals, and it took them like 2 weeks.

Compare that to mine, which while a pain in the ass really only took about 20 hours total, and I made 7 "stringers" instead of the usual 2 or 3 (I used composite decking on the stairs, which requires support every 9-11 inches) which made it a lot harder (and heavier).

And of course, concrete steps really only look right when they go right up to the house, they don't look right attached to a deck, and they certainly aren't something you want IN your house.

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