Building Your Own Stairs

Stringers, risers, and treads are the three essential parts of a staircase. The stringers are the notched boards into which the risers and treads fit. If you look at a stringer, it looks kind of like a two-dimensional staircase. Risers are the vertical boards between stairs. For more info about building deck stairs, follow the link. Treads are the stairs themselves, i.e. the horizontal boards you walk on.

Building a staircase can be done in many ways. Before beginning this project, find out what the building codes are in your area and make sure to follow them. The following information is meant to give you an idea of what you'll need to do before you can start building the stairs themselves.

The first thing you'll need to figure out is how many stairs you'll need. To do this, you'll first need to determine the rise, or the total height of the staircase. The distance from the porch or deck to the ground is the total rise.

Once you have this number, divide it by seven. Seven inches is the standard height of a single stair. If the rise is 42 inches, for example, you'll have six stairs because 42 divided by seven is six.

It's a good possibility that your rise will not be evenly divisible by seven, in which case you have two options. One option is to make the top or bottom step slightly taller or shorter, though this isn't recommended. Follow the link for more information on stair building. The other option is to make the stairs slightly taller than seven inches. You can figure out the height of each stair by dividing the total rise by seven, rounding down to the nearest whole number, then dividing the total rise by the new number to get the height of each stair.

If the number of stairs is more than seven or eight, you'll need to seriously consider putting in a landing. Technically, you can build a staircase with up to 14 stairs with no landing, but experts agree that doing so is less than ideal. The more stairs you build on a single stringer, the harder it will be.

The width of the staircase is the next thing you need to determine, as it will tell you how many stringers you'll need to make. Generally, you'll want to make the width of the stairs equally divisible by the width of each tread board. So, if your treads are two feet long, you can build a staircase that is 48 inches wide with three stringers. If you use shorter boards, you'll need more stringers for a staircase of the same width or you can make the staircase narrower.

The run, or the depth of each stair, should be at least 10 inches. This works well with 2x6 boards, as you can fit two of them in the 10 inches. Visit the linked site for more info about building stairs. To figure out the total depth of the staircase, or the total run, multiply the depth (run) of each stair by the total number of stairs.