Crazy suggestion or what?

Harry Bloomfield

Harry Bloomfield

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BBC 1 'Sort your life out' - guy sawing the entire vertical faces out of wooden house staircase, to replace the timber with a series of drawer fronts, with drawers behind them.

What an absolutely crazy idea - the vertical face, provides support for the horizontal timber you step on. A very dangerous thing to do and I suspect it would make the house unsaleable until a new staircase was installed, or proper repairs carried out.
 
I saw something similar done but the carpenter doing it was reinforcing the bit of wood left under each step with steel bars.
I never saw the finished product, but i went up and down the stairs and didn't move at all.
In fact, it felt more rigid than many old staircases I have seen.
 
Harry Bloomfield said:
BBC 1 'Sort your life out' - guy sawing the entire vertical faces out of wooden house staircase, to replace the timber with a series of drawer fronts, with drawers behind them.

What an absolutely crazy idea - the vertical face, provides support for the horizontal timber you step on. A very dangerous thing to do and I suspect it would make the house unsaleable until a new staircase was installed, or proper repairs carried out.
Click to expand...
I honestly think a bigger concern for me would be the prospect of coming downstairs in the dark at night and putting my foot in a drawer that one of the kids have left half open and injuring nyself or worse. I also think you are right about legality - I'm pretty sure that modifying stairs this would way would come under notifiable works and that the BCO would take a pretty dim view of it

If by vertical faces you mean (as I think you do) the risers, then I agree that on a closed riser staircase it isn't the best of ideas to cut them out. But maybe not for the reasons you think. Risers are generally quite thin and don't add much strength to the treads providing the treads are sufficiently thick to start with. On many terrace house stairs and also modern domestic stairs (with MDF treads), however, the treads are so thin that the risers probablty do add stiffness by sharing some of the load with the tread below (thus reducing the tendency of the upper tread of he two to bow under load), but most of the load is actually still taken by the ends of the treads where they are inserted into the housings and wedged. And you woiuld need to ensure that the wedges were properly glued and knocked in tight so that they don't cme loose. What really concerns me is that on the underside of the treads, where the risers are housed into the treads, there are triangular wedges glued into place whic contribute greatly to the stiffness of the stairs as a whole and that cutting them out will make the stairs a lot more bouncy. These things:

Stairs Glue Blocks .jpg

Above: Glue Blocks under Tread
Below: Underside of Closed Riser Stairs
Underside of Stairs.JPG


All this makes the idea a bit of a no-no to me. IMHO there are better ways to use the space which don't create a danger to life and lime such as these two examples:

Drawers Under Stairs 1.png

Drawers Under Stairs 2.png
 
Harry Bloomfield said:
BBC 1 'Sort your life out' - guy sawing the entire vertical faces out of wooden house staircase, to replace the timber with a series of drawer fronts, with drawers behind them.

What an absolutely crazy idea - the vertical face, provides support for the horizontal timber you step on. A very dangerous thing to do and I suspect it would make the house unsaleable until a new staircase was installed, or proper repairs carried out.
Click to expand...
Yes, even the mrs thought it a stupid idea.
 
I quite like the trap door on the quarter landing. Just have to hope it doesn't get left open at night. Could have a light in there comes on when it's open, that way if someone leaves it open at night, you've got half a chance of spotting it in the dark.
 
I tried doing that in our house and built myself a cellar under the half landing - had to stop when 'er indoors complained about being hit on the head by a bottle I dropped when she was coming up the cellar steps... You can't win sometimes
 
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