Okay, this job is another one of those tricky parking jobbies.
I could only park on yellows 100 yards away from the property to unload the van - this took about an hour.
I then drove for a while to find somewhere to park the old bus. I eventually found a long stay car park 10 hours for £1.50 - result. The only negative was a 20 minute walk to the job and all up hill.
Anyways, once I set everything up and organised myself, I got to work in carefully removing the old stair. Here it was this morning where it's been for the last 200 years.
You can see by the floor, this part of the stair was originally closed in probably with a T&G timber framed partition. The stile of the frame is still fastened to the wall.
The top bit is a bit of a mess.
I enjoy removing old work like this. I find it interesting to see how the old carpenters in their day went about making things including a staircase like this one and although it's been here for a long time, I don't feel sad as this stair certainly needed replacing.
Here, I've started to dismantle the first few treads/risers. I can clearly see the first few treads/risers were fixed to another T&G timber partition separating the bathroom to the landing, although the room back then was probably a bedroom. It looks like timber work and plasterboard was added much later to thicken the wall - 1970's I reckon.
Here, you can see the treads have been nailed up into the underside of the risers using handmade cut nails. Of course today, we would use a metal fixing through the riser into the tread.
And here is one of those old Georgian handmade cut nails. Lovely.
Here is the wall.
Now then, I will be making individual stud wall supports below each tread/riser to the floor and up to tread #5. From there up to the ceiling, the plan was to make and fix neat battens to the wall following the treads and risers. But, I don't feel battens will be adequate support on this wall, so plan 'B' was to cover this part of the wall with a sheet of 18mm MDF cut to suit the treads & risers. This plan will provide excellent support for the top half of the stair and will look very neat as well. So this is what I'm going to do.
Here is the stair completely removed and ready for a new one.
None of the old treads were housed into the post as shown here and I'm going to follow suit with the new.
I shall start building the new tomorrow and I'm looking forward to it.
Report back soon.
Cheers,
In my previous life, I was a tree.