The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[Steve85]

I guess it was a good weekend for some projects.

I finally went over to Lowe's and grabbed the following to build some steps.
3x 5-Step stringers
10 1x8 deck boards
3 "hidden" stringer mounts
Appropriate screws for treated lumber

Woke up my helper at 11AM and we got busy building steps off the sliding glass door to the back yard. 


Our neighbors that have done this mostly made the steps just the width of part of the door that opens but I thought it would look better and provide some extra seating by making the steps the full width of the door.

Process was pretty simple. We dry fit the stringers with a deck board and measured for how much we had to trim off the bottom of the stringers, which essentially made the bottom step half the height of the others.



With a dry fit of the stringer, we made marks on the header board below the door for the stringer brackets. This is where I had a brainfart though and instead of measuring for the middle, I put the the middle bracket at what looked like the middle of the door. It's not and so the middle stringer is offset but oh well, won't see it.

We turned to the step boards. I would have preferred to use the pre-fabbed step boards but they were only 48" wide and we needed 68". We measured out the boards and I taught the helper to use a chop saw. Not pictured as I was more concerned with making sure all ten fingers survived the lesson. We took the time to make sure as few imperfections in the wood were exposed (writing, small cracks, etc) and I'm glad we did.

I drew some faint lines and set the boy loose with the screw gun and T25 bit.



I used the torque setting to try and get the screws to similar depth but the wood hardness was really inconsistent. Some didn't go far enough in.



I had to go back with T25 bit in my impact to drive them in a bit deeper. It was weird, the screw gun could spin the screw all the through if I didn't stop, but couldn't start the screw once in.

Finished product, except for the step faces. Nothing fancy but love having easier access to the back yard to eat outside and it was a pretty straight forward father-son project.



Ideally, that little cove will be a small deck then have stairs down to a patio where the chairs are.