Stairs

We talked to Janne about the need for stairs. There are two approaches to the big house, one from the main path near Tony's house and the taxi boat dock, and the other downhill through the woods towards the sea.

The main access will be along the side, facing the little house, and they're really needed there as the deck is over waist high. Today we have a few pallets acting as steps but it's still a bit dicey to get up and down. We want to have as shallow a step as possible, mostly for Ollie, but shallow is better for us older folks as well! The problem with wide and shallow steps is that you'll need a lot of them to provide enough rise to get the height needed, and this makes the whole staircase longer.

I measured a bunch of steps to get an idea of what would be the best compromise and discussed it with Janne. The treads of the steps will be wider, about 36 cm, and the steps will be quite broad, to match the width of the deck, or about 2.3 meters. The key measurement is the rise, or height of each step. The average rise is 17cm, and we're going to use that as the maximum; Janne will try for 15cm but we have to fit the staircase to its surroundings as the real world isn't as simple as my little sketches!

I don't know if we'll be able to do that work when I'm over at Easter; the weather is unpredictable then. But I told Janne I was ready to carry the lumber over at least if he was able to order it to arrive when we're there.