I finished the basement floor project, including building the trap door to access the central drain. The floor ain't pretty, just sheets of O S B, but it seems quite sturdy.
As part of putting down the new floor, I ripped out the basement stairs, which had been pretty seriously compromised by termites. This weekend I started building the new stairs. Instead of cutting the saw tooth stringers, much too tedious, I am just using 2X12s with the treads and risers sandwiched between them. A lot simpler, but never-the-less, pretty darn hard to cut those angles exactly right. The big pain is just making sure the measurements are as exact as you can get. Cutting off the ends of the 2X12 to get the angles for the upper and lower ends took a while. I can easily calculate that I needed a 43.5 degree angle but being able to measure out everything to cut that angle was frustrating. Being off a 16th doesn't seem like much until you get twelve feet away, and suddenly you're an inch off from where you want to be. Not to mention that the header I was resting the top of the stringer against, was not even close to plumb, so if I wanted the stringer to rest nice and flush against it, I had to re-cut it at a completely different angle. I got the stringers cut and mounted, but had to leave half way through today, so one more week without steps I guess. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [email protected] Tel: (412) 268-9081
