Cellar Stairs

The brick and stone walls of the cellar entrance also needed tuckpointing. To give the masons access the walls in the cellar entrance I had to disassemble and remove the cellar stairs. These sorts of projects are always an adventure. I did the demolition a couple of weeks ago.

Once again I discovered another project where somebody was apparently experimenting with a wide array of fasteners. Most of the treads were attached to the stringers with a framing nail at the back and a phillips head screw at the front. Interestingly, not all the nails were the same size. In addition, there were at least two screw sizes present as well.

Because there's not really a good way to attach the top of the stair to anything, there was a wooden support structure in place. It used mostly square drive screws, though only about half were actually driven into the material far enough to engage the other board. A handful of phillips head screws were also used. The heads of all were stripped. As a result, I couldn't remove any of them, except by using a sawzall...

After pulling everything apart, I was chucking the pieces onto the driveway so I could store them in the garage, out of the way of the masons. Several of the stringers broke because they were made from 2x10s. And they overcut the throats where the rise and run meet.

The top board is the old stringer and the bottom one is the new stringer I made Sunday after I finished moving Mulch Mountain. Note the difference in the amount of lumber between the notch and the edge of the board. Also in the top board, note the cuts past the corner of the notch, weakening what little lumber is left.

Here's a different angle showing the entire stringer. On the left is the new one. They are the same length. The optical illusion is because the one on the left is made from a 2x12 and is going to support my weight...