Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat Building a garage-apartment with a pond view

Foam rubber; after you DON'T call the inspector and discuss it.

I have another suggestion afer the inspector passes it.

Have D'ski do the walkthru with the inspector.

Hey, you did call HOUSTON.

Use the stairs to go up. Install a pole to slide down.

Bski, how would the head clearance be if you dropped the elevation of the landing one (or 2?) steps and extended the length of the upper stairs by one (or 2?) steps. I think this would necessitate moving the door at the top of the stairs 90 degrees to the right, giving an upper landing with the window and closet access as you discussed above.

Comments:

1. Best flow through ventilation would be with the stairway door open to draw air up through both floors, cool in at the bottom and warm out at the top. But perhaps you will want to exclude shop/garage odors some times, so I can see where wanting access to the window without having the stairway open comes from.

2. There are two places in my parents' old house, the bottom of the stairs and the entrance to my Dad's workshop, where I learned to duck as I reached 6'3" in height. I hardly ever hit them after I got out of my teens. (Of course, I didn't live there much after my teens, either.)

You'd trust any of these three around a brass pole?

My first choice would be a too small for code landing. Second would be as is. Third would be , as Burger and I keep telling you , a safety harness and rope tie off and swing down from the upstairs window.

I was thinkin' more on this one last night. Then, I found the national codes for stairways.
Rockytopper can correct me if I am wrong...
The only way I can gain the height at the headbumper is to drop the landing by one step. This would extend the upper stairway run by one more step. I do believe that it will be close, but it should maintain about 38" of landing.
In the pix, the lower stairway treads are 42" wide. They would narrow down to 36" to correctly ascend to the now smaller landing. At 36", they are the min tread width allowed.
Having the landing lower by 1 step does provide a bonus WRT the lower stairway. It makes it 1 less step, thereby moving it back from the service door by 9".


Regarding not having a landing at the top of the staircase, I picked this one up from the code.

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If the alteration to the landing does work out, I pick up 8" of height at the headbumper for a total of 77" clearance. Code is 80". The building inspector is (about) 72". It's worth the gamble.

Bski I'm not sure what rise and run you have. One way to fix the problem is to use the landing itself be part of the stair case and instead of just turning 90 deg you turn 180 deg with the stair case assuming you have the space to do this. Refer to this link of my floor plan http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=9017&fpart=3
to see what I’m talking about. I also wanted to make the most of my square footage so the stair cases were limited in space.

That may be the best advice you've ever given here, Eric.

How about a winder.

Thanks for checking in, RockyT. A winder would be the next option if this one doesn't play out.

I would have never suggested something that stupid. Here are more intelligent solutions:

Bilateral leg reduction.

Cut a "head clearance" notch in the cross beam.

Place a hard hat rack at the top and bottom of the stairs.

Forget what your mom said and always slouch when walking up the stairs.

At the appointed time for inpection I could give the inspector a personal tour of your property wearing only my neoprene brazillian cut cod piece. Fear and loathing goes a long way toward speeding up a home inspection.




Hey I earned $157.00 at the first Pond Boss due to the brass pole in the bar. Of course I was being paid in dollar bills to stay away from the pole but heck it all spends the same.

Brettski:

I think you have a clear direction with a contingency plan in place. I'd go the drop the landing with a winder back-up plan route.

with JHAP and the codpiece a reluctant 3rd option.

I would send you back into the 5 jungle-like acres of Black Locust trees where all the woodpeckers reside. Once they got a good look at the tour guide, it would be like a remake of a Hitchcock thriller.

Easy Virtue? Skin Game? The Man Who Knew Too Much? Spellbound? Stage Fright? I Confess? The Wrong Man?

We went to the project this weekend expecting the gnarly winter weather reprisal that had been predicted. I had the stairway reconstruction on top of the priority list. We were pleasantly surprised to find that we could work between the light raindrops and continue to work on the exterior....our prime focus for this spring. Since we had a week of dry weather leading into this weekend, it means the gishy mud had dried out somewhat and eased maneuvering around the perimeter of the building. We broke out the ladders and started work on the upstairs windows.
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Sometime last summer, I kept my eyes glued to Craigslist for a scaffold plank. Not only did I find a great expandable aluminum plank, but the same guy had a pair of nice aluminum ladder jacks in his trunk. The price was right. I have never used either item before, so I was nervous as a cat on a tightrope. In the end, it was one of my best decisions.



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There are a total of 11 windows on the second floor. Three of those are the 5' square picture windows that look out over the pond. As I type this, they remain uninstalled. Yep; took the easier road, but we did manage to get all 8 of the smaller windows installed. We are pretty pleased with the results of our weekend output.



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Now that I am more familiar with the ladder/scaffold setup, I feel better equipped to mind-engineer how the 2 of us are going to handle the bigger windows. Heck, if the weather holds, we might take a shot this coming weekend.
Every time we get some inspiration, we try to share it. Having the ability to look out from our new perch was a very cool milestone.

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Yeah...gotta get the big boys installed...gotta

I have a feeling your progress will slow when you get the big windows in. I f the pond view is too distracting you might want to put the gorilla wrap back over them. So did you get the stairs resolved or are you saving that for later.

Neat video. I like the ladder/scaffold setup. I had never seen those.

I was unable to see the video, Was complaining of a invalid file sturcture.

Thanks for the window walk around tour. Nice water btw. Any spring "look what I found" events to mention ?

Just remember that those large windows will act the same as a sheet of plywood in the breeze, but the consequences of dropping one is much greater! It might make it easier to get them up there if you can remove the glass and take those up there one at a time. Even take the glass up thru the house once the stairs are completed.

For some reason these photos really put the size of this structure into perspective for me. Dang this place is HUGE. Thanks for continuously posting updates.

Never touched the stairs. Not enough time. Each window takes almost 2 hours to install, including moving and adjusting the ladders and resetting the scaffold. It goes slow for me. I move much slower when I'm "hangin' out there".
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WRT the stairway, we will drop the landing by one step and re-connect everything. The two upper 2 x 12 stringers will be scrapped as too short and replaced with stock that is one step longer. This is still pretty high on the priority list; Dski and I are both tired of climbing a ladder to get upstairs.

Other than the 2 kids on thin ice a week ago and a brim full pond, nothing exceptional.
Trapper Joe collected 13 rats last fall. I don't know how the population is today.
Kinda funny, we are finally seeing the falling timber we hoped for in the shallow wetland. The turtles were lined up on the first log that landed out in about 3 feet of water. They have good taste; a cherry tree.