Greetings my friends. It’s been cold inside the hotel for the last couple of days but that has not stopped Katie and Me from making progress on the staircase.
As expected, the concrete seismic work at the bottom of the stairs reduced the ground level landing size to the point where it was no longer code compliant. To remedy this, we removed the last three steps to make way for a plan so clever that it would make a weasel proud.
With the bottom three steps removed, it was an excellent opportunity to shore up the original stringers. I built a short wall which I firmly attached to both the stringers and the floor below which removed much of the original wobble which had been there since 1870.
Now here’s the clever bit. We moved the landing up three steps and turned the bottom of the stair 90 degrees to land in the saloon in a much more dramatic fashion.
This entailed making short stringers for the new steps. Yes, they are a little awkward in design but it was just a matter of having a limited selection of tools. I have the perfect saw to make a standard stringer to match the originals but it’s in storage and dog help me in finding it. Sigh.
The completed landing looks fine and I was even able to salvage the old stair treads to keep that wild west look. The one hitch is that the existing window seen here will now have to be replaced with tempered glass so that anyone running down the stairs after a couple of beers is not likely to run through the window and be impaled on the glass shards. It’s not likely to happen but better safe than sorry.
The next task, was the underside of the stairs. In order to make way for the drywall, the interior of the closet and the underside of the stairs outside the closet had to be framed out.
The inside of the closet was easy since everything was within reach. The sloped ceiling outside the closet; however, was a bit more dodgy. It was accomplished by me balancing on an eight foot ladder with Katie cutting lumber and handing it up to me. If this isn’t romance, I don’t know what is.
Finally, we gave ourselves a chance to do something more fun. Katie and I bolted the historic marker on the front of post office.
And the neighbors up the street approved.