Sometimes I really hate doing the right thing... - - Because the living space is on the second floor over a garage, building code (and practical reasoning) does not allow egress thru a garage. The basic premise is that the most likely place for a fire to start would be the garage area, so having to travel thru the garage to escape is senseless. Yes, we do have an emergency ladder to escape thru the windows at the second floor, but I would much rather use a stairway to make an emergency exit. Many structures like ours use an exterior stairway at the rear of the building, but that looks like hell so I nix'd it right from the beginning. Since we are located in Podunk, the pressure from the local building inspector regarding the egress was non-existant. Quite frankly, I was perfectly happy with our plan to run the stairway thru the garage and be done with it. Then we hit that point in our development where I had to make the final decision...and...I caved in. Although safety is supposed to be first and foremost in all decisions, those that have read about some of my acrobatics during this construction project would know that I have sometimes blurred the fine line between safety and dopiness. I was gonna just plow forward with the garage egress, but the real game-changer was considering what might happen if/when we went to sell it. Any buyer's hired inspector would likely throw a red flag on the garage egress...so....now is the time to make it right....not later when it is a real headache. All right, all right!!! - I absolutely refuse to put in an exterior stairway, so there is really only one option. We have to firestop the existing stairway. We put the revised plan into gear. - The old, existing stairway with all the crazy plumbing drains. The maze of pipes underneath the stairway is right where the main soil pipe exits the structure. We are planning a utility sink and a washing machine hookup tucked up under the stairway, so the roughed-in drain lines look like some kinda Blue Man Group PVC musical instrument.
- We pulled the entire stairway and cut out a section of the awkward, exposed PVC vent line. I want to insulate and drywall the entire corner before installing the stairway. This process of removal and re-installation was part of the original plan (just not the part about completely isolating the stairway from the garage). I hate piecing in drywall around a stairway. It is much neater to finish the corner, then install the stairway. Oh...did I forget to mention that I also hate taping drywall?
- We had to trim back many of the stairway parts by 1/2" to compensate for the addition of the drywall to the wall framing, but it worked out fine. We hit all the original lag bolt holes that secures it to the wall framing and the stairway re-installed perfectly. We laid in the framing to separate the stairway from the garage, creating a vestibule. A little more framing under the staircase, a little bit of electrical, a little bit of re-arranging the plumbing vents and drains (to hide them within the new vestibule wall), a fire rated door, and bring down the hot and cold water lines that are staged up in the ceiling and we are done with this little side show.
