Stair Framing # I

good morning in fact you probably me in the video today a friend of mine younger friend who had never built a set of stairs asked me if I would create a little tutorial using Sketchup to show him how a set of stairs was is to be constructed over the years as a young carpenter in the apprenticeship program when I was 18 oh gosh over the next Oh 40 years us probably I probably drove nails into at least 1,500 maybe 2,000 houses and a good portion of those houses had stairs in them and early on I decided to learn how to build stairs and I had some pretty good teachers back in the early days I was a little stubborn in most regards but when I wanted to learn something I was generally all ears so anyway I had some good instructors and and then scads of experience after that I drew blueprints on a couple of hundred houses and so I also learned how to draw them correctly so this is kind of the culmination of oh gosh close to 50 years with being involved in framing houses building houses building stairs building roofs etc so here we go first page I need to get my mouse or I can click pages so that on the first page here what we have is just an overall view of the stairs and oftentimes what limits the rise and the run what determines the rise in the run is the space that you have between an opening and the top landing the opening down here and top landing up there sometimes you this can be if you're drawn to blueprints of course you can make this whatever you want but sometimes you are the you're building a set of stairs on blueprints that somebody else drew and oftentimes these guys just throw numbers at it seven and ten you know or eight and ten and so they'll draw a set of stairs in there eight and ten if it doesn't they just shrink them down well it needs to say a lot of draftsman a lot of architects have never actually built a set of stairs so with that in mind and you'll have to learn how to make those adjustments and rise and run and still come up with a set of stairs that will work now this set of stairs I drew with 14 risers at seven and eleven sixteenths and thirteen threads at 10 inches each 10 inches it's pretty standard because your treads are made out of two by ten two by twelves most of the time or often if they're going to carpet or they're made out of hardwood and that stuff will be anywhere from 11 and a quarter wide the thickness doesn't matter because you make those adjustments 11 1/4 wide by by the length and then there'll be 11 that quarter to 11 of 3/8 you might start off with 11 and 3/8 on a piece of douglas-fir 2 by 12 for your treads but over time that's going to shrink so you know it's going to shrink 1/16 ornate so I figure 11 in 3/8 which gives you 3/8 of an inch I'm sorry into 3/8 of hangover where the tread extends past the riser board now I normally frame my stairs out of two by twelve stringers two by twelve in fact probably 95% of whether it's there's any stairs I ever built with me out to by 12 strangers two by twelve treads and one by eight risers so that's it the basic stair build is oh and this this ledger up here I usually make that out of whatever either a two by twelve or a one by twelve I'm sorry two by twelve or a two by eight or whatever will fit in there or I just cut down a piece of the decking that we used up here on the on the upstairs deck on the on the wood floor and oftentimes if there's enough I'll use that stuff for my treads too but it's not as good as two by twelve to one span as far you absolutely have to put a horse down the middle which is a third stringer down the middle of the stairs if you're going to use the plywood for new treads now if this if this opening had been drifted to the left ten inches instead of being where it's at was over this way ten inches I would have I would have gone with fourteen treads and fifteen risers because that would have shrunk this down I think to around seven and five sixteenths which is the closer you can get to seven in my opinion the better off you are the closer you get to eight the steeper the stairs are the harder they are to walk up now another thing is when you're cutting your stringers you know nobody does this you know an old-timer taught me this trick 45 years ago when you cut your stringers you've got you've got them all laid out you use the square and sum square gauges to lay out your stringer and you got your pencil lines all on it so when you when you cut the Fred you start above the line where that where the blade is just touching the line and as you cut towards the inside of that notch cut out you drift about a sixteenth of an inch below the line what that does is make sure your treads tilt just a little like this now that's exaggerated but when you're walking down those stairs to do to do to do you feel like you're being forced to lean backwards and when you and when you walk up the stairs you feel like you're leaning you feel like you're leaning into the stairs if you get them dead flat that's okay but you know but if you were to get low on the nosing and high back here worth where the riser is well when you were walking after you'd feel like you're leaning backwards and you were walking down you'd feel like you were leaning forward being catapulted off of the stairs so it does make a difference and if you if you think about it above the line and then just about a sixteenth below the line when you get to the riser that way this point and this point will remain at your seven and eleven sixteenth this point will be slightly a sixteenth more than that but nobody's going to notice that and looking at it you'll only notice it when you're walking on the stairs you might not want to do that if you're using hardwood yeah and a lot of fancy trim you don't want have to deal with you'd like to stick with nine degrees here can you follow what I'm saying now if this if your stringers are gonna nail to a wall I've never felt bad about running my skill saw by a little bit and by this way a little bit because you still end up with about five inches of solid wood that you're nailing to a stud every 16 inches with a couple of 16 inch 16 penny nails or that or long screws or however glue and screws how are you doing it and so you got plenty of support sometimes when I felt really fussy it wasn't in a rush I would bring a jigsaw out that cut to the line with a skill saw and then and then finish the cut out with a jigsaw either way is fine so that's about enough on this page let's go to the next drawing and here's the top landing you can see that your two by twelve tread is 11 and 3/8 and like I said that'll probably shrink a little bit okay over time if you've got it anchored well back here all the shrinkage will take place on that nosing and not leave you a big crack back here there's your ten inch from the face of this riser which essentially is a riser even though it's a rim joist it still it still acts as a rim joist riser here in this case and so you're ten inches you can see this cut out 10 inches you can see this notch cuts out seven and 7/16 yeah those have to be marked out very precisely and the mathematics has to be done very precisely otherwise your stairs just won't be a hoot you can't have your stairs I've seen them seven and sixteen all the way up till you get the last one the guy screwed up and the last one instead of being seven and eleven sixteenth it's freaking seven inches or something you know or seven and a quarter and you know or seven and seven eight you can't have that this has got to be as near to it to perfect as you can get it you get that thing within a sixteenth or a thirty second all the way up you're golden okay this is the lead drives talking about earlier in the first video our first picture I easily make that out of this material or I make it out a piece of 212 ripped it to fit I like to notch around it I like to run screws or nails and preferably screws through the backside of their ledger end of these 2 by 12 stringers and I always put liquid nails on every connection if you don't know what liquid nails is you can find it in any hardware store it's a construction adhesive that's two things first of all your because you're cutting it angles you're dealing with kind of half-assed ingrained which doesn't glue well with Elmer's or anything like that so you need something good and thick thick body glue liquid nails provides that it does two things if your cuts aren't perfect it provides a cushion of that so when you drive these nails then it pulls up tight and the glue kind of fills your little imperfections yeah you're not cutting this out with a you could cut it out with a router I've seen guys do it I think it's too much work but even then you're it's only as good as the jig you made so so I use liquid nails everywhere this joint between here if you can see my pointer this joint that where the riser is connected to the tread I like to screw or nail that with a bead of liquid nails across the back liquid nails here about three screws down through the top liquid nails in this joint again and then screws about every eight 10 12 inches whatever it takes to get it to pull up tight there's no sense overdoing it so that's here's again is my note cut stringers so the treads are slightly low a 3/32 inch plus towards the upper landing so that's what we're talking about getting this slight pitch to the trends oh I want to go back to the first dragon it was something very important I miss there when you get to be doing the math all right you here's my measure over here 107 and five-eighths now this can be mathematically calculate because you know you know how tall your studs are you know this you know this but yeah I like it just measure it all right at this point down to here from the top of the floor at my nosing don't forget when you deck the floor to leave that nosing stick out an inch and 3/8 from the top of this to the floor down below now that doesn't guarantee that your math is going to work because what if this floor is eye level and this is actually at this point is actually an inch lower or a half-inch lower or an inch higher or half-inch higher well that has to be reflected in this 107 and 5/8 in other words if if this if this floor is 5/8 inch higher than it is over here then you're gonna need to change this number from 107 and 5/8 and your math is gonna have to be based upon 107 inches not 107 and 5/8 so you need to get a straight two by six that will what tomorrow the same way they're doing that to me oh I'm bumping the dang mouse okay that let me get that but again that will bring it right back where it belongs okay so yeah what were they saying so you need to get that this is a 130 inches right so that's not quite 12 feet it's a little lesson to 11 B so yeah so you get a 12 foot 2x4 or 2x6 that's straight okay and it's not perfectly straight but the crown up but the level that's close to centers you can imagine it being and that and now you can measure if you have to lift this end up then this is high if you have to live to this end up in order to get a level this end is low you can calculate how much it's low or high and add or deduct that to your overall rise get the idea so an hour to top training and then we go back to there's the bottom now at the bottom you have to know that once you've laid out this string and with all your pencil marks and stuff on it you have to deduct the thickness of one tread you have to cut it off the bottom of your stringer right here then notch it and this 2x4 gets glued and nailed to the floor if it's concrete you might have to drill for some pins to go in if you're working on a concrete floor yeah but this see you can deduct that inch and a half this is six and three sixteenths rather than seven and eleven sixteenths all right so that's that's important the other thing too is if you're using one by eighths they might be just a little bit shy on the bottom like an eighth or a quarter that won't bother anything just go ahead and and make sure they're there they're tight there even with the top before you put the tread on tied up here it doesn't matter if they're a little shy in the bottom next picture this is an under framing shot there's your stringer nailed to the wall here's your other stringer imagine a wall there there might not be okay sometimes there's not a wall on that side and you have a hand railing exposed hand railing but generally speaking most stairs will have a wall there so at each at each stud in that wall you need to put two or three 16 penny nails and/or screws because you know what this thing squeaking you want you want the screws going through here into this top tread you know what screws going through this I mean everything has to be screwed and glued otherwise you're gonna get squeaks over time I know this from experience I've built a squeaky stairs before we had to go back to the port anywhere carpeted and I could run some big screws down through the top and get rid of those squeaks it's mostly when I was using nails set of screws there's a perspective it's it's pretty simple the little notch down there where you're notching for your stringer this is to keep the stringer so it's pinned in there it can't come down as long as this can't move right so without that the stairs could slip this way you're putting a lot of stress up here this way you're sharing this grass between here and here it's it's actually pinned in there by gravity the mathematics mathematics are not complicated all you need is a simple four function calculator to do this you know the landing height is 107 and 5/8 but if you don't know how to convert 5/8 into 0.625 you just divide the numerator by the denominator it gives you that decimal point so you divide 5 by 8 5 8 divide 5 by 8 and that gives you a point 6 2 5 so your stairs is 107 point 6 2 5 divided by 14 we can see that little mouse pointer divided by 14 equals seven point six eight seven six four I like to go out a few decimal points it doesn't matter there on the calculator you might as well use them yeah so now once you've got that number now you've got to convert this back into a fraction because that's what you take major deals with so you take the seven point six eight seven six four minus seven which is that seven that leaves you with 0.6 eight seven six four now you want to convert this into sixteenth thirty-second or sixty fourths no point in going any better than 64 s in fact you probably won't even go that fine because that's that's pretty fine so now to get to get this 1116 you simply take this number times the denominator so the denominator 1/16 16th is the denominator so you take this this this decimal number times the denominator equals 11 16 equals 11 equals 11 16 11 16 plus 7 inches equals 7 and 11 16 it's very simple I mean if nothing could be easier so you end up with 14 risers at 7-eleven sixteenths inch 13 treads at 10 I always use 10 reduce the height of the bottom riser by a thickness of 1 treads we went through that so you have seven eleven sixteenths for your normal risers - mention a for the thickness of your cred material if you're using inches thick red material which is pretty common you know any deck one-inch but in this case an inch and a half equals six and 3/16 you've got to get that that's got to be done otherwise the thing won't work okay if but if if if you can get some sheetrock on the jobsite before you install the cut all the treads and all this kind of stuff for your stairs sheetrock the stairwell before installing the stair stringers it sure makes it a whole lot easier later - you don't have to notch that sheetrock around all in steps I mean I've had to do that before and then you have to tape running a trim around that it's a big nightmare use liquid nail adhesive between all the connections nails there okay screws are better less squeaks if it is possible to sheetrock the walls before installing the stringers if it is impossible to sheetrock the walls before installing the stringers fir the stringers away from the wall away from the studs by an inch and a half so you can slip the sheetrock in you can slip an apron board down in next to the backs of the stringers so you don't have to trim all that stuff okay if you need to sheetrock into the stairs at a third Center horse riser cannot exceed eight but the closer you get to seven the better the closer you get to seven the easier it is gonna be to walk up those stairs and then I gonna be a steep and if you can you can even you can even go below seven to about step about six and a half if you've got the room all right yeah and less sort of openings or something in the way that you need to do something so if you need to sheetrock into the stairs add a center horse let's look at that thing again the perspective view not that one under landing okay if you have to sheetrock under here you can either run backing blocks between the stringers what I normally do is just add a third stringer and what exactly one of these one of these stringers an exact copy of it down the middle alright and I saw the same way I did the other ones with screws and glue and the whole bit and that's not really called a stringer the stringers to run the edges this is called a horse down the middle so you put a horse down the middle if you're gonna sheetrock hundred okay now the Laughing the calculator to convert a fraction to its decimal equivalent divide the numerator by the denominator the top number is the numerator to convert a decimal to a fraction multiply the desired denominator by the decimal the usual denominator in stare framing is 64th 32nd or 16th 1/64 inch is cutting it pretty fine finding that most cannot cut using a circular saw anyway but there is this I was taught by a fellow that set forms for high-rise buildings and the whole deal there was they they they tried to get as close to perfect as they could because they knew that the forms would move a little bit when you put in that heavy concrete so for him he always said that cut forms for high-rises he tried to get it in 64th of an inch now did he get that close probably not even before the concrete was set but he attempted to get that close so that he wouldn't be a mile off after the concrete was poured you can get the idea so yeah like the movie that Mel Gibson was in Eames small hit small I think that's what he said in that movie so that's it I can't think of anything else that's important as far as a stair building goes except make sure you get the math right that's all make make sure that you know when you're when you're figuring your stairs we go back this overview yeah when you first start doing your math you will divide this that's the rise first of all you'll measure from here to here and you'll say look I've only got one hundred and thirty six inches here so I know I can only get one hundred and thirty inches worth of risers right yeah I mean that's a given yeah you can't get 140 inches of stick out in there so you know you can only get 13 treads on this thing all right from here one two three four thirteen tragedy can I get 13 so if you have 13 tread you know you have to have 14 risers all right so so you know to divide this number by 14 but let's say the door was way over here and you didn't know brother Knight you get 15 or 16 and well you'd start with 15 and if that fit you got 15 risers so you know you have 14 treads so you're sticking out here now you can just calculate and look and see if you can get maybe one more in and if you can and it's not going to make it below about six and a half well then go for it if you if that's what you want to do if you if you want more distance there between the opening and the for some reason well that can be done too so the only thing struck in Granite as far as I'm concerned is that you can't be less than ah you can't have a a riser higher than 8 inches and you can't have a tread in the rough okay we're talking about the cuts that you gonna put on the stringers you can't be less than 8 inches here and you can't be less than I mean sorry you can't be more than 8 inches here and you can't be less than 9 if you make a set of stairs 8 & 9 it'll be perfectly legal but it'll be steep alright sometimes that's necessary I've been in tight spaces in apartments yeah well they just didn't leave a lot of space for for stairs and I've had to get approached the 8 inches and approach down towards the 9 in order to fit the stairs in you got to deal with what you got and that's about that so well if any of you have any questions let me know and I'll try to answer them in the comments section so that's how you build a set of stairs sadly I can't see ya you might use a radial arm saw cutting those treads and those risers but probably as you're in the field you're probably going to use a skill saw a circular saw to cut all that because it's rough framing you're going to put carpet over it if you're setting out you're cutting a set of stairs out of hardwood you're probably going to bring a fancy dancer chops out of the job one of those portable table saws and do your best to cut everything as perfectly as possible attached that it's it's it's difficult in fact I've only done that fancy stairs a couple of times because there are I came from big city Phoenix and I think Eugene has one too where I'm at now they usually be in a you know even a modest size the city there'll be a company that specializes in expensive fancy hardwood stairs with the rails and the whole business and and it's pretty hard to compete with their quality yeah it's very hard to compete with their quality it's almost like factory made so so this is this is what you're learning here is I will lay it out and how to frame it as a framing carpenter would frame it so thank you for watching and I hope this video was informative and possibly useful so again thanks for watching

Channel: Ed Waggoner Sr.

Views: 125,156

Rating: 4.6644592 out of 5

Keywords: stair framing, stair building, stair layout, stair materials, glue, liquid nails, screws, nails, carpet, ledger, riser, tread, rise, run, stair run, stair rise, stair landing, radial arm saw, table saw, miter saw, nail gun, caulking gun, circular saw, square guages, level, adhesive, tape measure, framing square, pencil, calculator

Id: lEQGH-d8XQg

Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2016