Stairway to heaven....or not

I have been a busy beaver, reveling in the late summer weather and working in the yard. The decision was made to replace our steps with a larger version in pressure treated wood. The current ones were built for Ms M's graduation in 1996, and have needed various repairs over the years. One evening a couple of weeks ago, a man selling meat from his truck came up to the door. J sent him off and called the police to warn them that the driver seemed to be intoxicated, since he couldn't even walk up our steps without falling.  The next day we saw the hole in the steps where a board had broken. Oops. Sorry about that, Mr door to door meat seller person.

The new steps had been in the discussion stage for awhile, this was no hasty- hide-the-broken-evidence scheme. J wanted a bigger landing, for a chair, he says, but I know it's a stage for his Halloween guys.

Halloween 2006

My job was the planning, and a word of advice? Don't round up to 2 feet because it makes the math easier, and what difference could two inches make, right? Turns out it makes a huge difference when one riser is over 9 inches high.

It looked nice, but we couldn't leave it that way. So, instead of building the second set out front, we had to move this:

 down the driveway and a right turn to the front door, which is never used.

I am proud to say that J and I did this by ourselves! Using some metal fence posts we had (Ha, to you people who say we save too much junk! You know who you are) and a rope tied to the truck, we rolled it about 50 feet total and got it right where it needed to go. Just as we finished, Shoeshine was dropped off by the friend who had picked him up at the airport the night before. He helped us build the second steps and was a very welcome third pair of hands. And a third brain helped too- always nice to have a tie-breaker.

We still have the handrails to do, but thank goodness we 'have' to wait a year before staining the pressure treated wood.