Amateur carpenters who have laid out the cuts in a stair stringer (the zig-zag structural support for the steps) know the queasy feeling that bubbles up at the prospect of this job. There’s the simple ...

You probably give little thought to the stairs you go up or down to reach different levels of your home, deck or patio. I’ll wager that if I handed you a measuring tape, a framing square, a pencil and ...

Picture a stair slope in your mind to estimate about a 40-degree slope and guess at a landing point. Rest any straight piece of deck lumber on the deck and level it over to the landing point. Measure ...

Simple stairs have just two components. The flat board that your foot steps on is called a tread. The treads connect to side stringers and sometimes to one that is in the middle of the stairs. The ...

Late last fall I got an email from a friend, John, looking for advice on building a new set of stairs going down into the basement of the house he’s renovating. John is pretty handy with tools, but ...

You may be like most folks. I’m guessing you give very little thought to the stairs you go up and down on a regular basis. They might be constructed from wood, steel, or concrete. The vast majority of ...