Some Thing I Have Learned About Stairs

I spent my day getting sucked into stair world. You know, we're doing this house and in the house there's this staircase, or at least there was a staircase until we took it out. Anyway today I learned a bunch about staircases.

Mostly I learned that sometimes the building code is not your friend.

See, it turns out in the code that a residential staircase with walls has to be 36" between the walls. If you're doing a staircase without walls then it has to be 36" between the handrails. Do you see what happened there? It means that a floating staircase has to be inherently wider than a staircase between walls. Wider by the width of the railings and the finger space behind the railings if there's an obstruction.

So, if you remove a staircase that had walls and try to replace it with a floating staircase and the whole thing has to fit in the space that has always been there... it won't.

And that's what we're doing.

Our stairs have no first floor walls, but pass through a gap in the ceiling that is a fixed size (the size of the old staircase). Also apparently they built the original staircase at precisely the smallest size it could be by code. The result being the new stairs don't really fit and one of the railings will really be place unoptimally.

Partway through this discovery I tried to apply some problem solving skills. We need 3-1/2". It's much like a TD scenery project so I figure I can find that much space. The plans looked like this going across:

1-1/2" space
1-1/2" rail
36" clear tread
1-1/2" rail
1-1/2" space
1-1/2" rail
36" clear tread
1-1/2" rail

So I puzzle over it an suggest:

1-1/4" space
1" rail
36" clear tread
1" rail
1" rail
36" clear tread
1" rail

Ding the math, that saves 3-3/4" and solves the problem, or at lest it would if the 36" wide step was the whole of the code. But it's not. The railing can't be 1" it has to be at least 1-1/2" and the spacing can't be 1-1/4" it has to be 1-1/2" (really, 1/4" matters to somebody) and you have to have the space between the rails EVEN IF THEY ARE AT DIFFERENT ELEVATIONS.

I swear it's enough to drive a body to vote republican.

So, the new steps, while cool, will not be exactly what we were looking for (or placed where we were looking for). But they will be up to code and pass an inspection. I guess that's better than doing what we want and then having to rebuild them to code.

Plus, there's an epilog. I went back and looked at the photos from the home inspection to see what was there before the demo. That staircase didn't fit under the hole either. Guess I wasn't (guess nobody wasn't) paying close enough attention.

I'll have to remember that for the next house.