This is a story about someone who doesn't know when to quit.
After what felt like an eternity, my staircase finally arrived. I ordered this one, but from what I've seen it's pretty much the same staircase no matter where you buy it. I knew it was going to be too short for my ceilings, it's designed for an 8" ceiling and mine are closer to 11", so the plan was always to build some kind of extension. The original plan was to do either a half turn at the bottom, or a landing with a turn at the top.
Once it came I played about with some layouts and decided a half turn at the bottom would work best. I wasn't entirely sure how to do this, so it was a learning curve for sure!
This monstrosity was my first attempt. It's ugly, and weird, and it made me so sad. It's built from foam core, covered in filler and then trimmed with some cocktail sticks. It was too steep, too short and just looked odd.
A note on what's going on in the background as well. I wasn't confident in my ability to measure and construct the stairs so that they'd be the right angle and meet the right spot of the upper floor. I had the "genius" idea to clamp a sheet of plywood in place, glue on two strips of wood to bring the stairs out to the right point, and then glue the whole thing together so that the stairs and wall were one complete unit.
I don't know why this felt like the right option, but as I've said before: ~*winging it*~
This time I attempted to build stairs with a 180 turnaround, which was awkward for two reason. I didn't have a lot of space left to build the lower balcony, so it was weirdly narrow, and if I was going to keep the stairs the same width, it needed to come out quite a long way across the corridor. I persevered though.
This time I used a combination of foam board and plywood to build the stairs, it was sturdier, but that's about all I was feeling positive around.
I started to add panelling on the side in the hopes I'd like it once it was decorated. The panelling is fiddly, but pretty straight-forward. A better material for this would be mount board, but I didn't have any so I glued three layers of cardstock together, cut it into strips, and then finished the edges with more cocktails sticks. I just eyeballed the spacing for what looked right rather than get crazy about perfectly measuring everything. I live in a Victorian house myself, and literally no corner is square or correctly spaced.
That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
I carried on with the panelling and gave it all a coat of black, the skirting board is a 2cm strip of foam board, scored to replicate the grooves of the doors, and then topped with a cut off kebab skewer.
I don't have a photo of it in place, but trust me when I say it looked baaaad. The stairs took up most of the corridor, there was about an inch between the stairs and the dining room door, and instead of being a part of the room, it felt like the entire space was being dominated by this big hulking beast.
It was a little after midnight at this point, and I knew the right thing to do was go to bed and come back the next day refreshed and ready to tackle it.
Obviously I didn't do that, and pulled the whole thing apart. I don't have any progress pictures of the next bit because I kind of blacked out a little in all honesty, but this was where I ended up.
Still narrow at the base, but it doesn't look as crazy anymore, and the curved edge really made it feel like it belonged in the space, rather than taking over it. I did that curved step by cutting 4 or 5 layers of foam board to shape, and then wrapping the whole thing in a strip of card stock. It gave me a smooth surface to work on and rounded it out nicely. I also pulled off the plywood wall which made it about 10 times easier to paint and move around.
I touched up the base coat and was much happier with it.
And in place:
It isn't glued in, it just sits nicely in place waiting to be painted. I haven't done anything with the back of it yet, because I'm still undecided if I want to add a door there or not. I have a half baked plan to build a basement addition at some point, and I feel like that would be the logical place to put a staircase going down to it. You'd only see it if you looked through the front door but still, I'll know it's there.
As ever, thank you for reading. I think we'll talk about lighting next time.
Bye for now!
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