Building stairs with a landing

How to build stairs? Measure the Total Rise to the Deck Landing. Picture a stair slope in your mind to estimate about a 40-degree slope and guess at a landing point.

Rest a straight board on the deck and level over to the landing point. Although stairs are among the more challenging home projects, building stairs with landings are not a great deal more challenging than a regular staircase. If you think of them as two (or more) separate stairways, the process is simpler. Just follow these seven steps.

It’s hard to say there’s a “best practice,” but the building code gives some guidance on good principles that should be followed to ensure a safe and long-lasting set of exterior stairs. SAFE, SUPPORTED STAIRS : Deck-stair construction varies, but the general requirements are consistent: proper footing support, and an adequate landing. Calculating Stairs with Landings. Sometimes the Total Height of your stairs exceeds the building code limitation and a landing is required. Although a landing is a part of a flight of steps, it is built just like a miniature deck.

As an example, if you want to build a regulation staircase, all risers will have to come at the same size. The only exception is when you build a staircase where a landing separates two sets of flights. In that case, these two flights can have different rises compared to each other. For this deck, the landing will be a pad on top of a 4-inch layer of gravel extending beyond the steps about inches.

Check your local code to be sure of specific requirements for your area. Free 2-day Shipping On Millions of Items. View Great Selection of Sturdy Rubber Stair Mats Made From Reclaimed Rubber.

The longest boards suitable for building stairs will probably be feet ( m) long. This means you will probably max out at about every steps. If your stairs have a long rise and run, you can install landings. The first stipulation is that the landing must be at least 36” long from the staircase to the far edge of the landing pad. We will teach you how to cut stair stringers to meet code for rise and run step limits.

These articles will also cover how to build stair landings and ADA ramps. Stair landing should be provided at the top and bottom of each flight of exterior and interior stairs. Stair landing is needed where a doorway at the top of stair flight swings toward the stair, Figure and Figure 6. For stairways with straight run that have an overall rise greater than 3. We faced a double difficulty of constructing a (replacement) exterior stairway over a rough hillside and stairs that had to land on a sloping surface. Stairs cannot be continuous without have a landing or floor level that breaks up the flight of stairs.

The height limit established by code is intended to provide a reasonable interval for the user so that they may rest on a level surface and to alleviate the negative effects of long uninterrupted flights. The landing will be inches deep in the direction of travel, but there is a beam against the wall at about shoulder height that projects inches from the wall. Once the layout s satisfactory, find the height of each winder using the landing section of our calculator.

Build The Winding Stairs. The are automatically fire so record each one on a nearby framing member. It should be as large as the footprint for all of the winders put together. Find these two places and determine if you have enough space at both ends to be standing up safely, or at least have inches available to use as the landing area.

Stringer Layout Diagram For deck design and structural information, check out the Prescriptive Residential Wood Deck Construction Guide , by the American Wood Council.