RENDITIONS OF THE HYSTAIRICAL       

Built for the Italian Stallion
- Rocky Balboa !

Ow!  Ooooo!  ... Adrianne !

Now this flared stair structure is not only ridiculous but is a big waste of money. This stair arrangement is also dangerous.

Those steps look like ones made from cement found in public parks or in the movie ROCKY. But those have safety handrails down each bend. This is a residential deck. And furthermore it's without any midpoint safety features whatsoever!

Flared stairs should never exceed 4 steps. It would have been much better if a mid-level platform broke up the descent because it would also break a fall.

Another Rocky Workout Stair

Another ridiculous stair of the same genre. With those knick-knacks set on the side-steps, just who would that railing be protecting from a fall?

And look at the bottom-most step. It must go with the style to coincide with the bottom posts.

No regard for safety whatsoever.  I've already said enough.

Here's a way not to do a flared stair (photo to the right). Not only is this a dangerous design -- because the changes in tread direction are not visible when approaching the stair from the deck until one is right  up on them -- but architecturally, it just looks ridiculous.

Breaker-Breaker 
Back-Breaker

In the photo to the left, those pointed 90° corners on the steps are hazardous. This is what the builder above was trying to mitigate by substituting two 45° corners for a 90° one. The stair here is still 2 steps too high for such a design. Why not just make a flared stair with diagonal treads?

Think this deck is pretty?
At your peril.

Watch out for these guys; they won't be watching out for you.

This style of flared stair off the lower deck without railings is two steps too high to be safe (max=3).

The stair connecting deck levels is flared similar to the lower one except it starts one step below the upper platform, so there is no protection from falling off the upper deck at each end of the platform -- Look closely at the wall and skirting behind the seat.

And how about that half-covered non-tempered glass window in the rear at foot-level.

These are liberties that neither a professional builder nor professional designer would take in trying to introduce design into a deck. This is strictly amateurish and demonstrates ignorance of the basics.

Lower deck looks like a half-out-of-the-box wedding cake awaiting for the bride&groom ornament ....
or just a heaping pile of poop, whichever you prefer.

The design is the problem

Just look at this confabulation. There are two ways to use these stairs.

The safest way to go down to the ground is to go straight out to the landing 6 risers below, then make a change in direction on this narrow landing and head to the stair railing alongside the planter. But this is the least likely way people will negotiate these stairs.

Because of the top step's setback, most people will head toward the narrow landing by going down the central corner of the stair for at least the third step and then change direction somewhere in mid-stair. And once such a change in direction is made, there's no landing anywhere all the way to the ground. And that makes this design a 9-step mine field.

Note also the next-to-last step resting on the wall's base board which doesn't line up with top of the step's riser. Because of the stairs' complimentary fit to the building's masonry architecture, it looks as if it was an architect who designed these stairs; but that skewed step is clearly the builder's fudge job.

Skateboarder's Delight !

Here's a deck that's all steps!  This is a big waste of money. It's only use is in getting down to and back up from the yard.

It is not as dangerous as the deck above because the builder made 16-inch treads here instead of 12-inch ones. But for every 16-inches of step the customer could have gotten 22½ inches of usable deck plus some kind of flared stair for the same price.

Mayan architecture resurrected for the 21st century.

Skateboarder's Delight #2
 

But what about the old folk?

Around here no one gets that far.

Another 7 Steps to Heaven

But if you stumble, it will be a one-way trip to Hell.

"Going Down the Upstairs"

Going down, ya stay to your left.
Going Up, ya stay to your right.
Ya don't step on the flowers.
And no passing in the night.

"Honey, did you see where I put my sweater box?"

Two things to say about this:

 First, the balusters are made from "rebar" steel, the reinforcement bars that are placed into cement. These rust and permanently stain any nearby wood with big black run-down marks. They are also easily bent. It's a cheap trick to get a see-through railing. No master-builder would do this.

Second, the stair stringers were coved with boxy extensions of the boxy stair risers. Boxy stair risers like these are dangerous because they can trip you going up and catch the heel of your shoe when going down.

"Yea, you left a whole bunch of them out on the deck, last I saw."

Wonders of the Weird

Do you see that horizontal railing strung over the stair between the house and the elevated box-structure? There's no deck there; it's wide open! There is a matching horizontal railing on the other side of the stair that is a barrier for the elevated deck. But that suspended railing is ridiculous. Who would it be protecting?

That 8-legged box structure makes no sense either.
It's all a mystery to me.

A Leap and a Bound

Will Get You Down

This construction system is called EZ Deck.

You can tell from the railing that this is an economy decking system. But it has a real problem with stairs. The top three photos here show a bottom step that is always a precipice before the abyss!

And look at this Rube-Goldberg corner construct below. The 2nd step above the corner-platform (not visible) is two risers steep at the inside corner. That's 16 inches high. Miss that one and you're going ass over heels the rest of the way down!

Talk about the ridiculous -- this is friggin absurd !!!!! You couldn't get away with this anywhere in California.

This gives a whole new twist to "cutting corners" !

Stair with the corner pictured at right as seen from the ground. Notice how the railing cap diverges from the stair slope and the balusters at the corner are higher than the landings both above and below.

Here's the Stair Kit again

This is a PVC prefab stair. See that bottom step? Bottom riser is 3 inches off the ground when all the others are 7 inches. Prefab stairs just don't address your actual height because the stair comes in multiples of 7-inch risers.

"Hey, we saved a bundle."

I give up; cheap-shit sells.

We're on a roll

Well here's a stair that just wouldn't work out relative to the terrain and this is the solution. How about a little excavating?

"Well, we build about 50 decks a season and 
once we're on a roll
we can't be getting hung up on some little knoll."

Randommation

You could just call this a self-organizing prefab stair. First you get a stack of solid palettes delivered on a palette to the top of your hill.  You move it over to the edge, cut the strapping and let 'er rip. Easy as pie. Plant and illuminate according to taste.

You can order this kit on-line from Helter_Skelter_Prefab.com

Just give them the drop in elevation and angle of recline and they will provide just the right height of right-sized palettes. Remember, the higher the stack, the further it's reach. You may need to make some minor adjustments to fit your case.

I have never been impressed with any do-it-yourself project. Sometimes the skill is lacking. But mostly it's the safety aspect that is ignored.

I'm not criticizing the quality of craftsmanship here. The problem is that most do-it-yourself-ers have no clue about the Uniform Building Code. And all they have to do is do a search for it on the internet.

The spaces in the railing here are larger than 4 inches, everywhere. The long stair railing has no separate handrail. But foremost, the stair lacks a railing on one precarious side. Given the 5-foot drop at the masonry wall, this stair is an injury waiting to happen.

I hate to see the benefits of all that hard work go to doctors and lawyers.

Do it right the first time and only pay once.

8.0 on the Richter scale
(Watch your step)

Here's a stair that homes-in on the walkway at the bottom. The situation arose because the deck looked best with a 45º corner. But the walkway came into the deck at a 60º angle. So each step was built at a 5º off-set from the adjacent one.

Stair looks disorienting from both the top and the bottom -- a side view surreptitiously hides the misaligned treads -- the real reason the builder only shows a side-view on his website, and the best side at that. The other side looks really weird because the steps stick out beneath the railing at different angles.

In California, we only see this stuff after an earthquake.

No lights; no walking rights.

Put there to keep out the inebriated at night and to deter those from exiting as such.

More butt-busters

If these steps in the top picture were continued down to a level landing they would have spiraled all the way down to the brick patio below, another 4 steps. And how about that abysmal last step?

Below is another stair built by a different builder but both are similar in that they lack any railing. Look at those exposed sharp outside corners. Eventhough it's close to the ground, the stair requires a safety railing on the outside.

Well the customer liked it!
Yeah, one like that left an impression on me too:

I slipped on a mossy stair with no railing on one side on a rainy day back about 5 years ago and landed on a corner like that. I still have not regained the feeling in one buttock where I landed. That's what I mean by "butt-buster". Damn glad I was a male; I'm still mobile.

Whoa !

Look at those steps!  You go from a 10-inch high step onto a 20-inch pile of loose dirt at a 45º angle. And that's before the rain.

Although an economy deck
it wasn't as cheap as dirt.

←Here's another one of the same genre!

"Well, that's what the plan called for
-- 3 steps -- no more, no less".

The landscaper was late.

Good Grief

"Look, the plans called for 4 steps and we build to plan."

"Hey, we only build decks, we don't do walkways; that's the landscaper's job."

Crash Landing

Given the design of the deck one might think that there was no choice here for the deck-builder to do what he did. That's also what he will tell you with the attitude "weren't I clever in the way I dealt with it."

Well there's nothing wrong here with the quality of the workmanship. The problem comes from the style of stair being wrong for the terrain in the first place. It's a forced fit to a given terrain of an incorrectly designed deck.

A design professional would have addressed the terrain in the design plan, not in the construction. You can just guess that it was the builder's own design to begin with.

By crashing the stair into the land instead of giving the stair a proper landing, he's proven himself to be a poor "stair-viater". He should be grounded without compensation of any sort.

Hoverdeck

Looks like there's a trend emerging in Deckland. I think I'll miss this one.

Landscaper to the rescue.

Hover Step

Look at that floating step under the planter-post. Blame it on the landscaper again: "He didn't put the landing in the right place."

Or:

"The ground just shrunk right under our feet."

Give me a break.

Not in America

A stair has two directions: sloped and vertical. This design has only sloped and counter-sloped. Any railing should have some vertical elements in the railing besides the posts. As it is, it looks like something out of 40s Berlin.

Hey Ho Heil

Notice the lattice in the stair railing. It was installed to align with the lattice in the deck railing above it. As it is, it's out of sinc with the stringer and rails of the stair and just looks misaligned!

The lattice should have been cut so that one set of lath runs level with the ground and the other true vertical. Then there would be no clash with the lattice in neither the stair nor the deck railing because that lattice is on an entirely different plane. It's a matter of getting your priorities straight.

Doesn't look that rosey to me.

          Whoops

I can tell you what happened here: the contractor was scrounging cut-off scraps for the railings and he didn't have enough of either pattern to make complementary panels.

We all know that there are  contractors out there who think it's slick to cut corners and there are people who seek a deal they can't refuse --  and each seems destined to find the other.

"Hey, you can do it, we can help."

I found this photo under the heading "Home Depot decks".

When the step height is higher than the riser board, the board should be placed just beneath the tread, not set upon the tread of the step below. Now there's no way to clean off the debris that collects on the stair that otherwise could be hosed through the space between the tread and the riser.

And how about all those exposed edges on the top step?

Not only was this built with economy lumber, but it's clearly a do-it-yourself project. The heading says it all.

Wing Step??

What could possibly be the purpose of these winged extensions of the second step?

This is how a minor oversight propagates into something ridiculous. The builder could have just put diagonal corners on the second step and avoided this architectural travesty altogether.

Appears like the builder was truly winging it here.

It's a Landscaper Deck

This bottom-runger has a niche
for non-conforming notches.

Look at that connection of the railing-cap of the stair  with the  railing-cap of the deck. The railing cap is short on both sides of the stair! This is a landscaper's job, not a deckman's job.

In the trades, landscapers are on the bottom rung in construction skills and they have no business doing decks. These landscaper guys lack the skills and know-how of a qualified deck-builder. And they usually hire immigrants with even less skills than they have themselves to actually do the work. So you end up having all these little screw-ups everywhere when they're done. This example here is absurdly ridiculous.

With just 2x2 balusters for support, those stair railings near the bottom step are flexible too.

Thumbs down

For incorrectly hanging this stair, the builder was ordered hung from the beam by his toes until his thumbs touched the ground.

That's a full-story stair nailed to a vertical board which in turn is nailed to a horizontal strip which is nailed to the underside of a header-beam for a support space of just 2 inches! This was a collapse waiting to happen -- until it was caught by an independent house inspector.

The problem arose from trying to make the supporting beam function as a header-joist too. If the  the beam was positioned under the joists and a separate header-joist used for the facia, the stringers could be properly attached to the beam on a lower plane. This is nothing but pure ignorance of how stairs are hung.

Crab Walk Stair

Look at those steps at the left!  Each step is offset from the one below it by a foot with no protection whatsoever if you don't perceive that. Now this may be acceptable to the homeowners because they'll get quite used to that, but what about guests or their children's playmates?

They may get used to it too once they crash and burn.
On the otherhand they might just go away hurt and never care to return.

What's the scoop?

What's the purpose of the bottommost step alongside the stair at a right angle to it? Just in case you head out over the steps sideways, to break your fall?

Those steps on the right should have a railing and the bottommost step should align with all of the other long steps on the left. As it is, this stair design is both hazardous and just plain weird.

Stair looks like a snow plough or a poop scooper to me.

Leave It To Beaver

Here's a stair that the builder tried to "round out" with straight pieces as the stair widened. He's banking on the principle that the more pieces there are on the same step, the closer is the approximation to a circle. So he goes from a one-piece diagonal step up top to a many-piece, near-round step at the bottom. And that just looks ridiculous, especially without any risers.

It looks like a beaver dam to me.

Stack of Steps

What these steps accomplish is give the owners a view of the yard from inside that is unobstructed by any railing. But unless there is an amphitheater out there in the yard, all those steps are a waste of space and money. Looks like a mesa in the Arizona desert.

Armadillo Hide was the deck-builder's guide.

Safety Illusion
 Totally decorative and completely useless for preventing a fall.

Safety Delusion

Wide steps 4 planks deep don't make this stair safe.

Not for grandma.

Incompetence Abounds
All Around

I just received my copy of the latest edition of Davidson's Fence & Deck Bluebook 2007. And here was this ad that depicted a vinyl railing applied to these semicircular brick steps. Now it can be easily determined just how high those steps are by counting the bricks and taking into account their orientation. The cross-section of a brick is 2 inches by 4 inches without the intervening ½ inch mortar.

The top two steps are each 11½ inches high. The next three steps down are 8½ inches high. The Uniform Building Code (UBC) limits any step to 8-inches high max and the difference between the heights of adjacent steps to 3/8 inch.

And then this ridiculous PVC railing is set at an oblique angle to the wall with each railing being a stand-alone stringer about 24 inches (3 lower steps) above the tread! The UBC limits the space between any step and the lower rail to be no more than 6 inches at the center of the tread.

And then there's that missing baluster at the top of each stair railing! ... And there's those crooked balusters at the bottom! Yet moreover, the railings are set out from the wall at different angles!

And to top it all off, this photo was used in an ad for PVC railings by the dealer who sold this stuff in the contractors' most  referenced resource book! See for yourself.

Talk about ridiculous. Tell me why I shouldn't pick on these guys. Am I supposed to be their partner in crime?

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