More Progress With Stairs

Posted on August 13, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

The contractor took a 2 week break which is why I haven’t been posting much about things getting done at our place. The delay is because the plan examiner we have at DOB reviewing our sprinkler plans is pretty awful at his job. He gave us an objection for having 68 heads on a 3″ water main connection when there aren’t 68 heads – there are 38. Even if we did have 68 heads the size of the water main connection is irrelevant if the calculations are based on pressure and flow (which ours were). He’s also more concerned about formatting than substance. We had a 2 week delay because he didn’t like the formatting for the sprinkler head schedule. Initially he said we didn’t have a schedule at all – when we did. Then he said the schedule our mechanical engineer came up with wasn’t formatted properly when our mechanical engineer does sprinkler plans (that get approved) all the time. He also basically refused to tell us whether we had all the paperwork in that we need to have in. Monday morning we have yet another meeting to try to get him to approve the plans. Hopefully he won’t come up with some new objection or piece of paperwork that delays us another two weeks. The problem is that by looking at the form of things rather than the substance, plan examiners like him can miss important items. They don’t do anyone any good.

This past week work resumed and the most noticeable thing that got done was stairs. Another story of stairs went in and temporary treads went in all around. Here’s looking down – you can see the the progress so far…

When it’s all done the steel will be painted white and there will be white oak treads. We were thinking of doing a gun metal blue finish on the steel, but it was complicated, rust prone, and visually it was a distraction. The stairs are supposed to be about the plexi side panels and the old joists that will create a screen along the stair hallway. A gun metal blue finish on the steel would have been distracting.

Here’s looking at parlor from the kitchen (in the front of the building), towards the dining & living room in the rear… (the temporary construction stairs are finally gone).

And looking the other direction from the living/dining room towards the kitchen…

You can’t see it clearly, but there will be a bathroom under the stairs.

That steel was done before we decided to paint the steel. On the floor above they’ve primed the steel so it looks red…

And looking from the other corner you can see down the stairs more easily…

Progress has also been made with the stairs in the rental unit going from the basement to the cellar. I’m not sure why they’re not in completely, but here’s where things stand so far…

The contractor also put the gutter and downspout on the building, which will stop much of the water from getting into the building. Rain water was sheeting off the roof and hitting the window sills as it went down the building at which point much of it was getting in the building.

A few other things have gotten done but those are the major items. Hopefully we’ll get our sprinkler approval on Monday at which point things will really pick up again.

Finally Making Real Progress With The Staircases

Posted on July 19, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

The staircase in our unit has been a bit of a hassle. The guy fabricating it does good work, but he’s not a big fan (or follower) of plans. Explain what you want to him and he’ll get it done, but when the architect insisted on shop drawings he resisted. I remember one time there was a panicked call about the stairs (“the architect miscalculated”) and I rushed down to the job site just to find that the confusion was easily cleared up by looking at the plans where it was all quite clearly laid out. Stuff like that has happened more than once – now I just take it in stride.

Anyway, when the stair guy resisted shop drawings it was with the proviso that if he didn’t have shop drawings he’d have to correct whatever we didn’t like. So in round one he did the stairs the way they were laid out on the original plans and delivered them to the job site the day after the architect had figured out there was a design flaw and they couldn’t be done that way. So the stair guy just put everything back in his truck.

In round two we discussed doing them one way but in actuality they couldn’t be done that way because the steel had to be cut at one point and it was cut so much it was too weak. It was something that would have been discovered with a shop drawing, so 2 of the 3 runs of the stairs had to be removed and redone.

Yesterday they put in their third attempt – and indeed the third time is a charm – only minor changes needed. Here’s what they look like…

You’re looking from about the entry way. To the right in the foreground is the kitchen. Under the stairs against the wall will be a powder room which is turning out to be surprisingly big. Beyond the stairs is the dining room and then the living room.

Now that we’ve pretty much resolved the issues with the stairs, the rest of them should go much faster since all the other floors are pretty much just like the first floor. I think initially they were saying he could do one floor a week. So we could have them all in by the first week of August. Actually, as soon as this first flight is done the workmen can get the bath tub up to the guest bathroom and install it. That will be cool…

Last time I mentioned the stairs I said Dan wanted them done in gun metal blue. That’s a really fussy thing to ask for. It has to be finished on site and it’s prone to rusting even after you put the finish on. This morning our architect mentioned another possibility and Dan and I both sorta like it… Paint the steel white (instead of having a gun metal blue patina), then have milky white plexi side panels (instead of clear). The side panels will be in these swoopy organic shapes, so the architect’s approach de-emphasizes the structural components (the steel) and puts the emphasis on the panels. We like that change. We also like that it reduces the color palette in the stairwell (always a good thing). The downside is that at the top when the stairs go up to the roof the milky white panels will block more light from the bulkhead windows than clear panels would. And at the bottom on the parlor floor the milky white panels will make the space feel more chopped up. So we’re thinking about it for a couple days…

They’re also starting to make progress on the staircase in the rental unit. That will just be a standard wood staircase – nothing complicated about it…

You can see the platform has been framed in. There will be stairs going up and down from there. You can also see that the stairs are open to the cellar “storage area” (media room / work room).

There will be a door to a closet / storage area under the stairs (barely visible in the photo), and a small door to get to the less accessible space under the stairs (which is quite visible in the picture. One huge plus about the rental apartment is that it will have tons of storage. There’s a huge laundry room with plenty of space for storage, plus all the space under the staircase, plus two closets on the ground level. Hopefully that will make it stand out compared to most New York apartments that have just tiny amounts of storage space.

Houses And Creative Imagination

Posted on February 28, 2010 by BeatingUpwind

We’re in the process of buying a townhouse. I’ll have more about that in a few days. But we’ve been going over plans and thinking a lot about staircases. I found an excellent site a while back called Stair Porn (definitely SAFE for work), which has been a great help and inspiration, but then I came across this image in Google Images and it made me think back to my childhood…

Spiral Stair Slide

Children have wonderfully creative minds and I can just see me envisioning a stair case / slide combo like that as a kid and thinking it would be great fun. One vivid memory from when I was young was wanting a place that was a big empty loft that was so big I could roller skate around in it.

Times change, needs change, and practicalities rear their ugly heads. But part of me thinks that a combo spiral staircase and slide would make a great fire escape on the back of a townhouse 🙂 But then I worry about what it would cost and the budget…

[The chevron pattern you see in the wood floor in that picture is another detail we’ve been thinking about incorporating. So there’s more in that photo than you might think.]