Deck Stairs – How to do it Yourself
Building deck stairs can be one of the trickiest things to do, especially when you are doing it yourself without hiring any professional help but when you have the proper guidance throughout the entire process, it does not seem to be as difficult. You don’t even have to be very good in mathematics to do the calculations as well but your calculations will have to be accurate to the T if you plan to get things absolutely perfect and this is the main reason why most people go for professional help in building the stairs for the deck.
Be it replacing an old deck stair or building one from scratch, it is definitely one of the most difficult things to do yourself and the slightest miscalculation could make your entire project go haywire and not only will waste a lot of expensive wood, but you might just end up making a very dangerous staircase. Yet, I can safely say that if you pay attention to details, you can build a strong set of deck stairs and here’s what you need to do for that.
First of all, you need to determine the approximate height and you can use a 40˚ slope to determine where exactly the last piece of the stair will fall. After you rest a board from the deck to the ground, you will be able to determine the height of the entire set of stairs. Once that is done, you need to find the number of steps on the staircase, usually by dividing the entire height by 7, which is the usual width for the normal deck stairs. Once the part where you find the total number of stairs on the set is done and you have rounded off all the figures as per the method of approximation, you can go down to the actual building of the stairs, but first, you must buy first grade wood from your local hardware or wood store. Making the stringer is again, a very difficult task and you need to constantly keep on testing it just to find out whether it fits on both sides that are on the deck as well as on the ground. Again, the handrails as well as guard rails should be a top priority for you as soon as you get finished with the stringers on both the sides. This being done, you can now move on to actually building the steps of the deck stairs.
The skirts, the treads as well as the risers are all essential aspects of the stairs that you are building and once you start following the guidelines properly and get into the groove of it, you will realize that it is actually not a difficult task at all and you will be able to get the job done on your own. But if you do get into any trouble, you can always call in professional help to get you out of the mess and build the deck stairs for you.
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