Esther and our oldest daughter continued to run more electrical wire…

and Matt and his contractor friend started working on the stairs. After puzzling through the complicated math for layout, the stringers were cut out.

Matt returned on a later day to start assembling the stairs. After re-puzzling over some math some more (did we make mistakes? Are we thinking about this right? Maybe the first way was right. Arg!), he had to make a few small adjustments but got the stringers up.

Our 12-year-old son was a big help with what was undeniably a two-person job attaching the fussy, heavy boards.

Matt rebuilt the landing at the top of the stairs; it had always felt eerily squishy underfoot–and whaddya know? It was, uh, barely supported. Glad nobody fell through.

Once the stringers were up, Matt reconsidered the proposed HVAC system. Originally the HVAC company wanted this grate at the bottom of the stairs where it would be walked on all the time.

Matt suggested putting it under the stairs and venting some of the stud cavities for airflow. Everyone agreed that was a better plan.

Stringers are in! Once they were attached, Matt realized he had forgotten to check that one dimension was straight, so they are a little off if you know where to look. But instead of taking out and redriving thirty-six million screws, we decided to roll with it. You’d never know except you were told.

Then we started putting in stairs! After several months of not being able to access the upper story without a ladder, it was a very exciting day! It took a bit of hard thinking and math again to make sure we were cutting out the pieces right. (We mostly succeeded.)

It was a bit slower than we had hoped it would be, so we only got three full steps in before we had to call it quits for the day. But we were both motivated to come back with a much better idea of what we were doing and finish the staircase!

[Yes, those are visible screws in the stair boards. The plan is to carpet the stairs, so that shouldn’t matter.]