Since he was there to actually see me fall, he knew I was hurt. He also realized that while yes, I was carrying THREE empty dresser drawers, if the stairs had been a little more uniform, perhaps the fall wouldn’t have happened even considering the drawers that were in my hands.
He’d hated those stairs since we moved in six years ago. They were very obviously not original to the house. They’d not been built by the builder of the main structure, they were cobbled together by the previous owner, a heating and air guy who’d decided in error to put in a furnace and an air conditioning unit that was entirely too small for the house. Since he was a heating and air guy, I’m guessing he figured he could help the units limp along over the years.
Alas, he was a brilliant about stairs as he was about heating and air. He’d either built or had them built so that there were three steps from the garage floor to the small landing that led to the kitchen door. These three steps were, from bottom to top, an eleven inch step, an eight and a half inch step and the last step up to the landing was five and a half inches.
Yeah, not so great when you can’t watch your feet and you’re expecting the next step down to be the same as the first step you took.
Anyway, Tom took off the offending stair structure and began building an entirely new set of stairs, four steps in all that are all six and a quarter inches from one step to the next.
He also made the steps deeper, as in, my size eight and a half feet actually fit on each step now rather than my hobbit-ish toes hanging off each one of the other, horrible stairs.
He angled the steps so that each stair going down is a little wider than the one at the top, so if you’re carrying something up the stairs, you don’t have to angle quite so sharply at that first step. The rail on the outside of the stairs is also much wider and sturdier.
All this to say that he’s my hero, once again. He worked so hard to make steps that are safe and functional for us. I’m reminded once again that I really got lucky when I met and eventually married this guy.
Here is evidence of his carpentry genius:
1 comment:
I am so impressed by people who can DO THINGS like this. If I were assigned a task such as "building some stairs," I would not even know where to START. It's a skill I wished I'd ranked higher in my dating days.
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