ARTISTIC STAIRCASES

We started out with a two level cabin, but the project has evolved a great deal. First, a basement was dug and poured underneath, then a cupola was added on top, thus bringing the levels of our small house to four! With that many floors, stairs are important.

In June, I put together this blog post of ideas for staircases. After mulling over these concepts for a while, we decided to go with metal framed staircases with wood treads on top—a floating staircase look. Well, I'm happy to say we are now underway with the construction of all three staircases.

We've hired area artist Kelly Ludeking to design and construct the metal portion of these stairs. Check out his cool website here: http://www.krlmetals.com/.

This is a still picture from the 3D design Kelly has made. This U-shaped staircase will be from the basement to the main level. The main level to the loft will have a very similar design.

Kelly is using a studio space that's large enough to construct a "set version" of our stairwell! The carpenters have set up the walls in 2x4s showing the exact dimensions of the space. Here he's holding a metal platform onto the beam to demonstrate how they'll work. The wood will be attached to each platform.  Kelly plans to complete each staircase as a 3 piece bolt-together kit that will be constructed in this studio, then taken out to our building site and installed without need for welding there.

This shows the back side of the constructed stairwell and Kelly with the stockpile of beams for the project.

Here's Kelly getting ready to weld the support for the one of the landings.

The stairs going up to the cupola will be one straight shot similar to this picture.