Stairs

New Stairs

My legs started hurting a couple of weeks ago and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, but eventually it became clear. The new house I bought six months ago is built on pilings on a moderately steep hillside. I hate having to scramble on uneven footing, so the first thing I did was hire a contractor to install a set of stairs down the hill alongside the west side of the house. They are like two and a half stories tall and I've probably been up and down those stairs 500 times since then, so I am pretty well conditioned to climbing stairs.

Those stairs gave us access to the west side of the house, but now we need access to the east side where the gas meter and the air conditioner are, so more stairs. I figured we could just cut some notches in the dirt and put some stepping stones in there, but Osmany sold me on the idea of making something a little more substantial because they are probably going to be there forever. So I went to Lowe's and picked up a bunch of one foot square concrete stepping stones. To make the steps more durable you need to support the outward facing edge. If it is just sitting on dirt, the dirt can crumble, the step will tilt and eventually your stairs will start to collapse. Well, what are we going to support the edges with? Well, we have a bunch of one foot square stepping stones, so that's what we used and now we have a set of stairs where each step is one foot higher than the last. On normal stairs, each step is eight inches high, so our new stairs are a little taller. It's not bad, and it's only for access to the utilities, it's not like people are going to be traipsing up and down these things all the time.

Except when we are working here, I am going up and down these steps four or five times a day and surprise, surprise, my legs started hurting big time.