Up the Non-Staircase

Demolition is always more fun than construction.

It's usually easier, too. Or at least, is requires less skill and finesse. I can hit, beat, and break stuff with the best of 'em. Today's example: our back staircase.

These stairs went from the backyard up to the second-floor laundry room. They turned the corner around two sides of the house, as you can see. They're not original; they were built in the 1930s when the house was converted into two apartments. The second-floor renters needed a way to get in/out of their upstairs unit without disturbing the ground-floor occupants,. Hence, these stairs.

They were built entirely of redwood, just like everything else in the house. Sadly, even redwood decays over time and these things had to go. In fact, they were officially condemned by the city before we even bought the house. It's all we could do to close the deal without demolishing them first. But we did have to promise to never, ever use them. (I promise. Cross my heart.)

Because of that, the city had no problem approving our plans to rebuild the steps in a different location. We never did like these stairs much, and probably would have demolished them eventually anyway. The red-tag notice from the city just gave us a convenient government-approved excuse.

That's a lot of redwood to throw away. Some of it was fine. A few of the boards came off in one piece and were still bright salmon-pink inside. Others were rotted through and really needed to go. Naturally, the rotted boards came off easily. It's the good ones that were hard to remove.

At any rate, the upstairs door is now locked shut, and I've nailed a few 2x4's across the doorway just in case. We're this close to starting on the new stairs (at least, that's what the builder keeps telling us) so we figured it was time to take these down. Besides, the weather was nice and it's always fun to destroy stuff.