Interestingly, ‘The Shelftagerie’ Is the Name of My Shocking Blue Tribute Band. But I Digress

So, apparently, after yesterday’s peroration, you can safely assume that we’re not going to be fussy when it comes to fixing the back stairs that lead to our new laundry room. There also will be no handwaving advice to persons lying in a jumble of twisted limbs at the bottom of the stairs. Minimalist architecture demands the occasional blood sacrifice! Don’t be just another prole with a handrail! Suffer for your — er — my art! 

I’m of a more practical nature. Human persons, some who I like, will often need to descend and ascend these stairs while carrying things without becoming a statistic. What do?

We’re not going to “fix” these stairs, exactly. To fix the stairs, I’d have to fix the house, and that’s out of the budget, if not out of the question for practical reasons. I can’t take the house apart and put it back together again from scratch. I’m working mostly alone. To truly fix the house, I’d need a cadre of dedicated carpenter-assassins who would hench for me, and minion around the place while I plotted and schemed and scribbled coffee orders on shingles. I did briefly consider hacking into the Kremlin’s computer system and placing a big X over the map coordinates of my house with the appellation: “ICBM silo in western Maine is preparing to launch.” That might have fixed our house once and for all. But my Dell Optiplex wasn’t up to the task, and henchmen aren’t thick on the ground around here. I’ll have to do the best I can with what I’ve got.

First things first. Let’s get all the wooden carbuncles that block the passage out of the way. They’re dumb in several ways. You have to stand on the stairs to fumble around in them. Don’t do stuff on stairs, I always say, when I always say that. If you stumbled and grabbed for anything to save yourself, you’d be as like to get a can of wax beans as something that would stop your tragic descent.

The shelferie… The shelfatagerie… The cabinelves…

Oh, the hell with it. The wooden stuff on the right-hand wall makes a skinny staircase even skinnier, and throws people descending the stairs away from the safe(r) side of the staircase. The stairs take a winding turn to the left at the bottom, and you don’t want people walking on the inside edge of a winder. The step tapers to nothing on that side. So to get started we nuked the place from orbit, figuratively, anyway.

Sorry, we’re back to fuzzy wife pictures. We did part of the project a while back. There’s the spare heir at the bottom of the stairs pulling off the last of the wall covering. This wall, in addition to the wooden barnacles you saw in the earlier picture, was constructed with a melange of drywall, homasote, wooden slats, and cardboard. No, really. Sections of it were cardboard with masking tape over the seams and paint over the whole mess.

If you examine the fuzzy details in the photo, you can espy one reason why I am reluctant to make many major, structural changes to this house. Look at that timber. We have a Victorian house built in the twentieth century, but it’s partially framed like a barn, with huge post and beam timbers. That beam is something like 6″ x 8″ and runs the length of the back of the house. There’s another, shorter one on the other side of the stair well. I’m not fooling around trying to move structural members like that until my dynamite budget is increased.

That’s me writing a coffee order to myself on a shingle, probably. The staircase is super high, so we had to set up a plank and ladder in there. With everything out of the way, we insulated the walls (they had none), and put drywall over the whole enchilada. By removing all the hazards to navigation, we increased the clear width of the stairwell to 40″, and still ended up with 36″ clear between the very sturdy railing we’ll put on the right side and the wall on the left. That’s borderline safe.

I studied the existing stairs. Every once in a while, I tripped going up the stairs, and studied them very closely indeed. I’m not that clumsy. What gives?

The reason that stair risers have to all be exactly the same height is that human beings are programmed to climb stairs. After one or two steps, what’s left of your mind, after all the Solo cups full of grain alcohol at the frat parties you attended back in the day, processes the distance between steps, and you automatically do it. You do it exactly the same way each step, lifting your feet and putting them down, without thinking or looking. If the step isn’t where your mind thinks it should be, you stumble.

I know this from experience, as well as possessing a library card. I remember way, way back in the mists of time when I was still playing in blues bands to get by. We played in some amazingly off-brand places. There was one joint I recall run by a nice man with narcolepsy. Said he got malaria in the army, and never got over it. Sometimes when you went in the back room to talk to him, he’d be sitting on a cot and his eyes would sort of glaze over and he’d flop onto the cot and that was it. Out like a light. After a while we noticed his attacks were often timed to coincide with any requests for payment for performing there.

The nightclub, if you could call it that, was in the basement of a building that had burnt down. The basement was all that was left of the building. You went down a long, dark flight of stairs to get to the barroom door. It used to be a bowling alley. They knocked together a horseshoe bar in the middle of it. and filled in the gutters, and voila, instant nightclub. Then they filled the place with patrons out of the gutter.

It was about as elegant as it sounds, and was in a state of disrepair that beggars description. The owner did most of the work on the place himself, between bouts of narcolepsy and sobriety, I assume.

So halfway up the stairs outside, one of the treads snapped. Cracked right in the middle and splintered. The owner, who was not named Norm Abram, cut a short piece of framing lumber, a 2″ x 12″ I think, and nailed it on top of the broken tread. That made one step in the middle of the long staircase 1-1/2″ higher than the last one, and 1-1/2″ lower than the next one.

You could always tell who was really drunk leaving that bar, because they were the only ones who could navigate those stairs without falling. When you’re blotto, each stair is one of a kind, and attacked as such. They’re all different, whether only one is or not. Anyone leaving after two drinks or fewer would invariably land flat on their face going up. Anyone who went down the stairs while sober, which was a smaller percentage than you might expect, ended up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

The owner slept on, and dreamed of better days, and quinine.

[To be continued]

Not THE God. A God

Back in the day, when I was at least tangentially involved in constructing single family homes, a god would occasionally appear. Not THE god. But he was considered A god, nonetheless. The plasterers had left the building, the painters had at least primed every plastered surface, the electricians and plumbers wouldn’t return for weeks, as all their rough work was long since buried in the walls and floors. Carpenters were thick on the ground, or more accurately, on the subfloor. They’d hang doors in all the rough openings, and bustle back and forth to huge stacks of wood trim to run doorframes and baseboards and all that jazz. And then the god would appear.

The god, in this case, was the carpenter who could build a staircase. He was still considered a carpenter, it’s true, but he was usually an entirely different animal than the finish carpenters, and egad, the rough framers. The regular finish carpenters oftentimes resented him. He got paid more than they did. He carried fewer tools in his truck, and more in his head than they did. The regular carpenters all felt that they could put in the stairs, but this jamoke got all the stair work, and the extra dough. They were usually wrong about their own level of stairbuilding skill. They could do it, sure, if you wanted to rip it out and start over when the customer or the building inspector got a look at it. Stairs be hard.

That was back in Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, and Connecticut, where and when such things mattered. I’m in Maine now. And I can testify, without fear of contradiction, that no one who lives in Maine, or who has ever lived in Maine, has any idea how to build a flight of stairs.

Stairs have rules. Bigtime. Unlike many of the rules that govern construction, they’re pretty smart. It’s too easy to reopen a fontanel on a staircase to futz around with them while you’re building them. In Maine, everybody futzes around, and always has. I’ll boil down the rules to a bare minimum for you:

• All the risers have to be the same height
• The risers can’t be too tall
• The risers can’t be too short
• The treads have to be deep enough
• The treads can’t be too deep
• The treads can’t overhang too much
• The stairs have to be wide enough
• There should be a landing at the top and bottom
• The open side of the stairs needs a balustrade
• You need a sturdy railing that can be easily grasped

Those are general rules. The specific rules have dimensions included, which can vary depending on where the stairs are located, and who will be using them. But for the most part, they’re immutable.

If you can find me a staircase in Maine that ticks all those boxes, I’ll eat it. You certainly can’t find one in my house, and the stairs leading down to the laundry room were extreme offenders.

• No two risers were the same height. Some varied by over an inch
• The only thing the risers had in common was they were all too tall
• Except for the riser at the bottom landing, which was too short
• The treads weren’t deep enough to capture more than 1/2 of my foot
• Except for the winders, who were too wide on one side, and too “nothing” on the inside edge
• The treads don’t have any overhang. The stairs are like the side of a ziggurat
• The stairs were almost wide enough, until you built some tree forts on the outside wall to hold all your Beefaroni cans, you ma(i)niacs.
• There’s a door at the top of the stairs where the landing goes. The bottom landing may be there, but it’s pitch dark down there, so how would I know?
• The stairs don’t have an open side, unless you count the winder stairs, where you find yourself immediately in midair about 2/3 of the way down
• The railing is a short flimsy stick screwed to the wrong side of the stairs, because you’ve built a tree fort on the outside wall, remember?

I’m telling you, this is nothing special in Maine. I’ve been in million dollar houses here and the stairs were just as bad. And while legacy staircases are pretty awful, I see lots of stuff like this now, in newly built and recently renovated houses:

I can’t help but assume that some raccoon-eyed skank on a cable teevee home show is now advising everyone to make everything even worse by removing any sort of railing because open plan.

A quick perusal of the Maine real estate listings will turn up dozens of newly renovated houses with their balustrades and railings removed like this. Not all of them place additional twee trip hazards on the bottom step, but I assume they’ll get around to it eventually, when the Hobby Lobby opens up. It doesn’t much matter what the style of the dwelling is, either. A relative of ours went shopping for a brand new house, and found one that cost over half a mil, completely designed and decorated in the current bland, moderne, roomba-navigable style, and it had a ladder to reach the only bedroom.

So this is not ‘nam, this is stairs, there are rules. We can’t tear down our house and start over, and I can’t rejigger all the house framing to put in a new stairs. We’re going to make these stairs better. Better enough not to increase the death benefit on our insurance policies, anyway.

[To be continued]

Interestingly, ‘Panoply of Inanity’ Is the Name of My T. Rex Tribute Band. But I Digress

I see in the comments from yesterday that starting our laundry room project has elicited questions from the audience. That’s good. I like those. I ask readers to ask questions. Unfortunately, these were intelligent questions. This presents problems. I avoid those like the plague. Intelligent questions deserve robust, well-considered answers, not fart jokes. I have such a panoply of inanity in my head, compared to the meager supply of potentially intelligent discourse I tote about, that I try to avoid answering intelligent questions if I can. But several readers looked at the pictures I supplied of that staircase, and wondered how we were going to avoid carrying clothes down it, and broken bodies back up it.

I asked my wife the same question. I had to wait until the ringing in her ears from the washer cycle abated a bit, but I slipped the query in eventually. No, that’s not a euphemism, but it has potential. At any rate, I suggested all sorts of expedients to transport the laundry up and down. I conjured schemes of somewhat elaborate laundry chutes and lifts, for instance.

I’ve worked on a few really big houses with bona fide laundry chutes in them. They’re actually fairly complex. Of course, I assured my wife that I’d cheat on the rules for a laundry chute. Everyone pictures some sort of public pool habitrail slide between floors when they picture a laundry chute. The building code frowns on that sort of thing. Just detailing the thing to keep fire from spreading between floors lickety-split will give you an aneurysm. There is no child yet born who will not try to ride a tube into a giant tub of fluffy laundry, followed by a spell in traction, because everyone from Bugs Bunny to SpongeBob SquarePants has done it while they watched. Dumbwaiter arrangements are even more complicated, and fraught with the potential for additional misadventures.

Mrs. Cottage immediately shot down every idea. She pointed out that all they did was add complexity to the process of doing the laundry, and the more important process of waiting for me to build the laundry, and she didn’t have time for any of that. She reminded me that I was attempting to make things easier and more pleasant, not more complicated. Well, I was supposed to be attempting it.

It’s an important concept to grasp, and everyone, including me for a few hours there, has completely forgotten it. I’ve boiled it down to an aphorism:

Adding another layer of something almost never improves much of anything.

The laundry is collected into baskets. The baskets are toted to the washer and dryer. The clean laundry is folded and returned to the baskets. The baskets are carried back to where the dirty laundry was generated, and the laundry put away. Adding another step to save trouble would only cause trouble. She knew it in her bones, and I knew she was right.

The world is currently in the throes of adding a multitude of electronic steps to every process in order to automate it. This is supposed to increase efficiency. I just spent two days of my life trying to get a phone number changed from one account to another at the same phone carrier. I went to one of their brick and mortar businesses first, and they couldn’t do it. I spent several hours filling out self-service forms on the internet, which didn’t work, of course. They added contusions to your mental abrasions by not working only after you’ve already entered enough information about yourself that even a coroner wouldn’t ask for it. And on two devices, at that.

Then I was treated to an around the world tour. Piquant pronunciation and flowery fricatives rained down on me from every continent, save one, I think. I didn’t hear any penguin sounds, but other than that, I was adrift on an esperanto iceberg for hours on end. All of that, every bit of it, layer after layer of abstraction and abstrusion, was an electronic laundry chute put in place to avoid having to do the work of one competent person with a pencil and paper and a desk phone. You could, you know, carry all that in a little basket.

So I’m going to make the laundry room better, not more complicated. Because I understand the process. I understand construction. I understand budgets. Because I understand my wife, a little, and want her to be happy. But most of all because I understand that the next day, the phone didn’t work anyway.

[To be continued]

I Didn’t Mean To Fix the Laundry Room

Honest, officer, I didn’t mean to fix the laundry room. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a laundry room. Well, I do have a laundry room, but your honor, I didn’t have a laundry room. No one saw me fix the laundry room, no one can prove I fixed the laundry room, so there’s no reason to accuse me of fixing the laundry room. By the way, do you want to see pictures of the laundry room?

Well, someone voted for it, back when I was asking commenters for advice. Someone pleasant, as I recall. So since we’re all thoroughly up to date and bored with our dining room, I have to write about something. Why not the laundry room?

I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t mean to fix, er, build a laundry room. It was collateral damage from the master bathroom remodel. Our washer and dryer were in our (unrenovated) bathroom, and they needed a new home before we could remodel the joint.

I was laboring under the misapprehension that my wife liked having the laundry in the bathroom off our bedroom, near the kitchen. Boy howdy, was I wrong. I figured that a basement laundry room added a whole ‘nother level (sorry) of effort to doing the laundry. Carrying laundry up and down the stairs must suck, right? Having the laundry on the floor where more than half of it gets dirty must be a convenience, amiright?

Wrong. Mrs. Cottage made me listen to the laundry once, to straighten me out. She spent her whole day listening to stuff like this:

That’s just one cycle of the washer. It does everything but play Tubular Bells and make your head spin around on the other cycles. And the dryer squeaks. I’ve fixed it about a dozen times, but it still squeaks. I think they installed the squeak at the factory, and I hesitate to tinker with original equipment manufacturer parts, so I let it squeak now. Anyway, when they both get rocking, it was like installing a bowling alley in my poor wife’s head.

So we decided that the master bathroom remodel would make a great wintertime project. But construction triage meant I’d have to get the washer and dryer out the front door, down the driveway, up onto the side porch, and into the basement before the snow began in earnest. I rushed to plumb a new spot in the basement for the pair to land, and my spare heir and I muscled them into the basement. Just in time, too. It snowed the next day, and that was the end of the driveway down to the back of the house for the rest of the season. Pheww.

Why wouldn’t we just bring the appliances down the stairs to the basement, instead of going the long way around the barn? Here are the stairs, that’s why:

Yeah, death stairs. They’re winders, and the landing at the bottom looked like this:

That’s a boarded up window on the left, under the plastic sheet. The builders of the house put a window at the bottom of these stairs, because they were smart. Some former residents boarded it up, because they were something else. At any rate, it was close enough to a physical impossibility to get the big, white appliances down the stairs without losing an heir or a laundress or my patience, so we went around. But I can’t let the laundress carry baskets of clothes up and down those stairs, can I? Not if I like her. I do.

[To be continued]