This will be a bigger project. In the flat I live in, I have built a loft bed recently. It is not only great and cozy up there, it also created a lot of space below for a desk and working area. The idea is to access the bed through one of the holes created by the open lattice wall. Currently, a ladder is leading up, however, this is not really idea. Not only is it rather steep and therefore a bit scary in the dark, but also it does not really make the best use of this space.

Therefore, I have set out to build a custom stair case that improves this situation and also has a couple tricks up its sleeve. This is what I would want it to be:

1 Research and Inspiration

As a first step, I took some measurements, to know what I am working with. Next, I went on Pinterest and looked for some inspiration on how other people solved such a problem. I found pictures like these:

After this, I played around with some numbers and measurements. The first thought was about the height of one step. I went around and measured and tested different stepping heights and came to the following conclusion:

Normal stepping height: 17-18 cm
Maximum comfortable height: 36 cm
215 cm (total height) / 36 cm (max comfort step height) ≈ 6 Steps
Best configuration: 5 Steps x 35 cm and last step of 40 cm 

The last step could be taller, as you would never walk up there standing and rather climb in anyways.

Drawing different configurations

The next step was to visualize the different options that would come to mind. This would come in handy to give a sense of how the staircase would feel in this type of space, if it seemes safe or visually pleasing. For this, I took the picture from the top of this page and printed it with very low opacity multiple times. I then drew over with pencil and markers to try different combinations.

As you can see, planning in a bigger cabinet for tall things was a must and therefore ended up in every sketch. This cabinet was also very suitable as the highest step located on the right. This left me with only so many options for the remaining four steps.

The sketches helped a lot. Before drawing, v3 seemed to be the best sketch in my head. However, after drawing I realized that this combination is annoying for walking up or down, as you have to change feet at the third step. I stared to really like v1. I think it looks very tidy and visually pleasing and, more importatnly, it is also the easiest to build (for an amateur like me). But there is an even better reason: I know for a fact that I will be walking up and down these stairs at least twice a day, while tired and maybe in the night while its dark. Therefore the priority is definitely on the stairs over the other things such as storage volume. Therefore v1 was an easy pick.

So the main outcome of the first step was deciding for the rough idea of the stairs.

2 Planning

After deciding for the rough layout through the last step, now we need to get more detailed with planning. Actually it helps me to write these lines, as it forces me to think through the steps ahead and not just start anything random.

I measured the space in the beginning of the last step, so we have this as a baseline. The whole space is quite uneven. The wooden beams on the right and left are not aligned and 8-9 cm shifted. Also the horizontal beams on the top are not on the same height level and 13 cm apart. This will make for an interesting planning :)

Lets build a little fact sheet of what we know so far, to get an overview.

# Total area
Height of bed area: 215 cm
Width of stair space: 113 cm
Depth of stair space: 98 cm - 109 cm, depending on left or right beam

# Steps
Height of cabinet: 175 cm
Height of last step (from cabinet to bed level): 40 cm
Height of one normal step: 35 cm
Depth of one step (98 or 109 / 4): 24.5 - 27.25 cm

Width of cabinet and stairs

The next question we need to answer is the ratio of the cabinet and the stairs. My first gut feeling was to maximize the cabinat volume for storage, but after some thinking about it, I changed my mind. I know for a fact that I will be using the stairs at least two times per day, while the cabinet might not be used as much. And the stairs will probably also be used while tired and while dark, so the priority is definitively on them.

After some quick research, I found that a comfortable stair has 80-100 cm width and unimportant / unessential stairs have to be at least 50 cm wide. Out of my 113 cm width budget, a reasonable compromise might be something like 70 cm. This is still comfortable to walk, while giving the cabinet 43 cm of usable width.

First drawing of the structure

Next, I feel the need to get an overview of how the stairs would look like from a construction perspective. How will it be assembled? What kind of parts will we need to cut? How much wood will it roughly be? For this I just started to draw different versions and things that came to my head until I knew more what I want and what makes sense.

This was very helpful and in this step, I figured out many things. E.g. that for something to carry a lot of weight from the top (bodies), it makes sense to have all top-facing wood surfaces be laying on top of side panels (left picture center right). I also realized that is structurally makes sense to have two big side panels of the stairs that carry the main weight. Then, I will put each stairs ontop of the side panels and they will extend into the back, creating seperated volumes.

Getting a carpenters perspective

As I am lucky enough to have carpenters in my circle of friends, I sat down with one of them and discussed my plans. Somehow I feel much better building such a project with a carpenters approval :) The good news: He said it looks good and it could be built like this. That is already a success for me! But while talking through the plans, two things revealed themselves.:

1. It can be done even simpler
   An even simpler and still structurally sound way of building the four stairs would be to have two strong rectangular pieces of wood on the left and right side. The right piece of wood is the left part of the cabinet and the left piece of wood would need to be screwed into the lattice structure on the left. Then, I would need to attach strips of wood on those wood boards at the right heights where the steps would lay on. And finally I cut rectangular pieces of wood for every step and lay it on the strips. This approach would save me a lot of cuts and weird shapes, as I only use rectangulars and strips, no other funky shapes!

2. I need to think about step strain
   The steps will have to carry a lot of weight from the top, especially when someone rushes down quickly. As they are 70 cm wide, they cover quite a gap and I do not want them to bend. Therefore I need to think about ways to make them strong enough to withstand years of use. In this talk, we came up with four ideas to solve this problem:

   • Use strong wood of at least 3 cm. Downside: Cost.
   • Use a vertical beam centerally under each step to support (like in the second picture here). Downside: Breaking the volumes below into multiple
   • Use a horizontal beam under each step. Downside: This will take away some verticla height of each volume below.
   • Use a thin metal beam or L-probile under each step. Downside: Additional work with a new material

As the next step, I will roughly estimate the square meters of wood needed and call the wood merchant to get an overview of the prices in different strengths (2 cm and 3 cm at least). If this is not too bad, I will go for the first solution above, otherwise I will have to think a bit more.

Here is a drawing of the simplified design after the feedback of the carpenter. Everything is rectangular and no funny cuts needed, which is nice!

Woodworkers money tetris

This project will need around 11m² of wood in total, if I just add up all areas of the individual pieces. At this point, I feel the need to get an estimation of the price. Therefore I called a local wood merchant that was recommended to me and got the following prices for birch multiplex wood:

125 cm x 200 cm x 2 cm = 70 €     # ≙ 28 € / m²
125 cm x 200 cm x 3 cm = 97.5 €   # ≙ 39 € / m²

150 cm x 300 cm x 2 cm = 144 €    # ≙ 32 € / m²
150 cm x 300 cm x 3 cm = 193.5 €  # ≙ 43 € / m²

Using my 11m² of wood, this would give me at minimum a cost of 308€, assuming I build everything from 2cm boards. However, this does not yet account for fitting the individual pieces into the wood boards. So as a next step, I tried to fit my pieces into the board sizes.

I drew the 125x200cm wood boards on paper in a small scale and started puzzling in the pieces needed for the project as efficient as possible. This felt like some weird carpenters tetris. As some of my planned measurements of the staircase is not 100% fixed yet, I could also try in this stage to play around to make the pieces fit better on the boards.

I also did some stair strain tests with some wood board I had laying around. The bending results were: A cheap multiplex board with 1.9cm strength and put over a gap of 75cm does flex a little bit when I am standing on it. But it held better than expected. This gave me the confidence that a 3cm stair strength will easily be enough to carry the weight of one or multiple people.

If I want to build everything from multiplex wood boards, I would need 5x 125x200x2cm for the structure and 1x 125x200x3cm for the stairs, which would cost 447.50€ in total. This is quite a lot!

Thinking about ways to save money

So let’s try to save some money. My baseline is the 447.50€ of cost from the last section. Lets try to bring this number down.

1. Replacing bottom and back panel of cabinet with a frame -70.00€
   How important is the backwall of the cabinet? How important is the bottom of the cabinet? With some adjustments, the cabinet could be built with a frame or fixed to the wall and not require the back and bottom panel. This would bring down the 2cm board count from 5 to 4 and thus save me 70€. But I need some carpenters approval for this.

2. Building stair steps with 2cm wood -27.50€
   If I would go down to thin steps and support them from below, e.g. with some wood strips, this would mean I could switch from a 3cm board to a 2cm board and save 27.50€.

3. Building short stairs -70.00€
   At the moment, all stair steps go all the way to the back touching the back wall. I could make each step exactly as long as it needs to be (e.g. ~30cm) and save a lot of money. This would make it trickier to use the volume under the stair steps, but maybe through some drawers made from cheaper wood, this would be possible. This way, I could perhaps get rid of another board and save another 70€.

If I would manage to pull these three off, this would bring down the price to 280€, which would be much better. However, I am not sure if number 3 will be feasible. I have to further investigate.

Getting a carpenters perspective again

Saving money by replacing some parts of the cabinet with frames made me feel like checking in with someone with more experience than me. So I got back together with my carpenter friend and asked about multiple questions I had, from using frames, saving money, how to make the wood joints, etc. Here are the main outcomes:

• Up to three sides of the cabinet can be removed He confirmed that using a frame instead of a board, or even simpler, using strips of wood attached to the wall as mounting points is possible and strong enough. Through this way, the bottom, back and right side of the cabinet could be removed from the plans. Of course it would not be the most aesthetic solution, but when each plate costs 70€, how important are aesthetics really?
• I was working with a wrong board size Through talking with him, I realized I noted down the wrong board sizes from the wood merchant. Instead of 125x200cm sizes, they are actually 125x250cm, which changes my tetris calculations.
• Saving on step depth might not be worth it Saving on stair depth is a possibility, but drawers are also expensive for the wood needed for them, as well as the mechanism that might be needed. So maybe I would spend more money (and time!) on building drawers than just using deep stairs like in the drawing.
• How to connect two boards on a corner In one place of the cabinet, two boards touch on the corner and they need to be joined safely. I was not sure what are good options and he told me about the following multiple options:
  • Screw together normally from top (very simple, but screws visible and screwing in face side of board)
  • Using a wood stip inside the corner and screw into both boards through the strip
  • Pocket Hole: Screwing at an angle from one board into the other
  • Using a thin dowel and wood glue (however woodglue prevents clean reuse of wood later)

This was helpful and gave me confidence to progress with the next steps.

Planning with new information

When confirming the new board sizes of 125x250cm, I also found out that there is a minimum order value of 600€ and a delivery cost of 32,90€. I am not sure how to solve this yet, as I plan to be below 600. Maybe I will order with some others together.

Now that I have new ideas how to save money and new board sizes that I can order, I felt the need to plan again and calculate cost options. Here is the updated list of materials I need, if I get rid of three faces of the cabinet:

#               q     w         h    s
   
Cabinet Door:   1x    175    x  43 x 2.1
Cabinet Left:   1x    175    x  95 x 2.1
Cabinet Top:    1x    43     x  95 x 2.1
Cabinet Right:  1x    215    x  95 x 2.1     # Not sure if I get this or not
   
Stairs Left:    1x    140    x 109 x 2.1
Stair Covers:   4x    70     x  32 x 2.1
Stair Step 1:   1x    95     x  70 x 3
Stair Step 2:   1x    81.75  x  70 x 3
Stair Step 3:   1x    54.40  x  70 x 3
Stair Step 4:   1x    27.25  x  70 x 3

After doing another joyful round of woodworkers tetris, I ended up with the following possibilities:

# Stairs made with 2.1cm wood, most cheap option
3x 125x250x2.1cm board = 262.50€

# Same as above, but with cabinet right wall
4x 125x250x2.1cm board = 350.00€

# Stairs made from 3.0cm wood, not enough wood for 4x stair cover
1x 125x250x3.0cm board = 121.87€
1x 150x300x2.1cm board = 144.00€
TOTAL                  = 265.87€

# Same as above with one extra for right wall and enough for stair covers
1x 125x250x3.0cm board = 121.87€
1x 150x300x2.1cm board = 144.00€
1x 125x250x2.1cm board =  87.50€
TOTAL                  = 353.37€

It is good to have these numbers. If I want to go for lowest price, 260€ is not too bad. But maybe 90€ on top would not be too bad to have it more aesthetic and properly build. But this concludes the planning and I am ready to order wood. I have to figure out how to reach the minimum price, but until then, I set this project to pending ⏳ until then.