Evening All.
I originally attended this lead back in January this year. The enquiry was to alter two separate flights of stairs in the same house. The clients have been working on their house for a while and they're trying to do as much of the work themselves as they can, and, they're doing okay - they're a young couple with a baby. The stairs however is out of their comfort zone. The 1st-2nd floor flight is a straight flight and the lower part of the stair now needs to be a 3 winder arrangement. The ground-to-1st floor flight simply doesn't work in its current state.
Here are 3 photos I took of the 1st-2nd floor flight. You can clearly see a wall has been removed, exposing the side of the stair. It's currently running onto a landing (which you can't see in the photos) which isn't ideal, and therefore, needs turning 90 degrees away from the wall and into the room.
Here's an outline design of the proposed alteration - excluding any profile details.
And now the ground-to-1st floor. This stair starts its journey in the pathway of the kitchen area to the dining room. There's no handrail until you reach tread #5/6 and even that isn't very good. The design is very poor and there's no character at all. It needs something. Also, there isn't much space from the 1st tread to the external wall opposite the stair, and as one can walk past the foot of the stair from the kitchen into the dining area, I thought about maximising on the space between the external wall and a stair tread by creating a platform as tread #1, making the path from the kitchen to the dining area wider. But of course, there would now be a platform to step over.
Here's the stair in its current state.
And here's the outline design - again, excluding any profile detail.
I submitted these proposals with an estimated price guide and after a few months of thinking about the outline designs, the clients like the 3 tread winder on the 1st floor, but they don't like the platform idea on the ground floor. They would rather stick with the current idea of the ground floor stair, but redesign the first 4-5 treads with large newel posts and some ornate character. I have since designed a replacement of the first 4-5 treads and amended the price. The green light has been granted.
Here's the new design for the ground floor stair - removing the old 4-5 treads and replacing with a new cut-string stair with large ornate newel posts. The existing part of the stair will be carpeted and this is going to continue down to tread #2, which is why I'm using a bespoke base rail over the cut-string arrangement. Tread #1 will be oak. The rest of the exposed stair will be painted. They would now like similar newels etc for the 1st floor stair too.
There are just a few minor details to confirm and then I shall order up the timber.
I'm looking forward to this one.
Cheers,
In my previous life, I was a tree.