Due to a dust mite allergy I am replacing all carpet in my house with wood flooring.
I’ve got about 60% of the house done but have hit the stairs. Removing the carpet showed me basic treads and risers that look ok (I’m not up for replacing them yet). I have a single problem/question. My stairs have a landing. You can see in the attached photos that the subfloor of the landing and the landing tread (3 1/2 inch) are level. For me to put wood down I think I need to raise the tread by 3/4 inch and replace it with one that is notched to join the flooring.
So my question is; does adding that height onto the step cause a problem? I am worried that the different height stair will be a tripping hazard.
Replies
Ok. So I read up the local building code.
If I were to raise the landing tread then I have to modify all the stairs below so that the rise is within 3/8 inch of the smallest rise.
The subfloor appears to go under the framing for the wall. I could cut and pull out the visible subfloor (I can’t find anything in the code about landing saying it needs a subfloor) and replace it with good solid wood making the floor for the landing.
I'm not a stair expert, but it seems to me that the basic issue is covering the exposed subfloor in a way that looks nice, while staying within code (which includes the associated safety issues). You could, for example cover the landing with thin flooring material (e.g. Pergo or similar material). But, that creates a transition issue at the edge (lip?) of the landing that would probably entail changing the edge strip in some manner. The other question is whether adding the flooring would put the stair/landing rise out of spec. Adding flooring to the treads would equalize everything, rise-wise, but that also multiplies the lip problem by the number of stairs, and adds a lot to the budget.
Materials,
It looks to me as if both the risers, treads and landings were not meant to be exposed. You seem to me to have two basic options. You can clad all the treads, risers, landings and floor above and below with 1" nominal material (raise everything up) or you can cover the stair flights and landings with some thin material. You might look at sheet vinyl which has some surprisingly good imitation wood surfaces. If it was my sister, she'd tell you to paint the thing but pretty hard to hide those common nail heads.
Peter
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