Recently completed stairs to a historic house in Prince Edward County.
Plenty of planning goes into every job I take on. You know what they say, measure twice and cut once.
Here you can see the existing front steps going into the raised porch to the right.
You can use a nice big shop vac to suck up dirt while you chip it out with a digging bar or shovel. Here I put a tarp on the adjacent garden so I wasn’t disturbing the topsoil. Cleaning up soil at the end of a job on a tarp is much easier.
Here is another shot showing how you can use a carpenters square and mini level to get your form tubes plumb and at the elevation you want.
It’s often easy to run a string line and put in a few nails or spikes as reference points before you start the next stage of construction.
Once the upper landing was built, the stair stringers were cut and the final location of the footings that will support the stairs can be matched up perfectly. Sure you can do all your footings at the same time, but doing the three stair footings after allowed me to ensure they landed exactly where the stairs end. Also, I wasn’t tripping over the footings while we built the upper landing.
