Watch That First Step... It's a Doozy

One of the things we discovered after pulling the carpeting off the front stairs was that the bottom step was rotted though. We'd suspected as much. When the wood gives way under your feet, you kind of know something's wrong.

Sure enough, when we ripped off the last piece of carpeting, some chunks of wood came with it. Now we had fist-sized holes in our front stairs. Only the bottom-most step seemed to be affected; the others were all fine.

As it turns out, the bottom step is (a) directly underneath the third-floor gutter, and (b) resting directly on a cement base. Because it's under the gutter, it got hit directly by overflowing water whenever that gutter backed up, which it used to do reliably every winter until I cleaned it out. But it probably overflowed a lot over the years and dumped water directly onto the same spot for decades.

Secondly, because the lowest step was built on a cement base instead of wooden risers, it couldn't drain. The water had nowhere to go, so the redwood just sat and soaked until it could eventually dry out. But because it's on the north side of the house, it rarely got any direct sun and probably took a looong time to dry. Taken all together, it's remarkable the bottom step lasted as long as it did.

For about a week we had a nasty piece of scrap wood lying across the hole so that nobody would twist an ankle. Eventually, Scott the carpenter (go ahead and make your astronaut jokes now) dug into the step and declared it a total loss. Enough of the wood had rotted through that it needed to be replaced, not patched. Fortunately, all the other steps were just fine. They'd been out of the water and lifted up enough to drain, so the problem was confined to just one level.

Here is Scott's replacement, made out of redwood just like the original. He also had to replace the square base of the newel post, seen in the background. Since the bottom step was acting like a sponge, the bottom of the post was constantly saturated, too, and slowly rotted away. We didn't know that because the hand rail was holding the post in place! But once the stair came away, it was clear that the post was dangling in midair.

New post base, new steps, and newly stripped remainder of the stairs. We're almost there.

As a side note, someone from the Pacific Grove Heritage Society wandered by while this was going on and asked if they could keep the original base of the newel post. They wanted it in their collection because the wood showed no pest damage at all, despite its age. You can still see the growth rings after 125 years. It had kept its shape and would have served for many more years if only it had been drained a bit better.