Making the Stairs

There have been several designs where I modeled the mass of the entire house (all floors and roof) before going on to fill in interior rooms or deciding where to place the stairway. This can work, but I have also found it to introduce some difficulties and complexities. Adding the rooms and the stairs inevitably leads to modifying the shape of the house to accommodate them, and we'd like to keep things a bit simpler. So, we will put in the first floor rooms (as we have already done), and then place the stairway before we put in the second floor and the rooms there.

So, now we will make the stairs.

Making Stairs

We decided that the stairs would be L-shaped, with a landing in the "L". This means we will create 2 sections of stairway and join them with a landing. This is very easy to do, but it's not very obvious from the user's manual. No matter. I am going to show you how to create the stairs in a few easy steps.

The First Section

Click on the Stair tool (the stairs in the toolbar) and click and drag from left to right in the space along the front entry wall (see below). Move far enough to make about 3 stairs.

Don't worry too much if the stairs don't snap to the wall, you can select them and move them until the right side of the stairs are against the wall. You do need to move from left to right because stairs are always drawn in the "up" direction.

The Second Section

Now, making sure the Stair tool is still selected, start in the space above and to the right of the short stairs you just made, and click and drag the mouse upward to make the longer set of stairs. You should have something like what's shown below.

Now, with the Stair tool still selected, click in the space between the two sets of stairs (right where you want the landing to be), and note that a landing is made automatically. The bottom edge of the longer flight needs to be close to the top edge of the shorter flight so the landing is a square. The program will pull both flights together to make the landing, and if the stairs don't end up snapped to the walls, you can move them into position. This is easiest done by selecting the bottom, shorter flight and using the center handle to move the entire staircase.

Tip #10: If you make a landing and it doesn't come out square (or, if it doesn't look the way you want it to look), simply select the landing (click inside it when nothing else is selected), and press the DELETE key. Now, reposition the stair sections more accurately where they need to be, and select the Stair tool and try again to create the landing.

The dimensions of the landing can be manipulated manually, but this usually results in having to reattach the stair sections to the landing. This isn't much of a problem, but if you've locked the tread width (see below), you will have to unlock it and then re-set and lock the tread width when you move the stair section to join with the landing.

Once you have made the landing, click on one of the flights and open the Staircase Specification dialog box (by clicking on the Open Object tool).

First, don't worry if the stairs don't reach the second floor or if they're steep or shallow. We will correct these "problems" in this dialog box.

The 2 boxes below the Tread Width button (yes, it's a button) represent the tread width for our stair sections. They should be the same. I usually use some distance between 9 1/2" and 10 1/2". The wider the tread, the less steep the stairs are. Let's pick 10 1/2, so ... click on the Tread Width button and enter 10 1/2 in the boxes below it, as shown. Now, select the Lock Tread Width checkbox so the length of our stairs won't change arbitrarily while we move them around and position them. We can still change the stair configuration, but the tread width will remain constant.

The 39" width (under the "Sec Width" heading) is the width of the stairs, and 3'3" is a nice, wide stair. You can select a width less than that, of course, but considering that everything has to go upstairs via these stairs, wouldn't you like that to be made as easy as possible?

We can play around with the number of risers in each section until we're satisfied, either by changing the numbers here (under the "# Treads" heading), or by pulling or pushing the stair sections to add or reduce the number of treads. Let's see what 3 and 11 look like, but we may change our mind and go with 2 and 12. Click OK.

Why didn't we set the riser height or do anything "special" to get the stairs to join up with the second floor? That's because Home Designer automatically adjusts the riser height (based on the total number of treads) so that stairs always reach the next floor. Of course, if we placed only 4 or 5 risers, it would decide that that's not practical and complain, but as long as it can calculate a riser at or less than about 9", it's going to make the stairs reach the next floor.

Tip #11: What if the program still says the stairs don't reach the next floor? Yes, sometimes this happens. Don't panic. Once you have closed the dialog box and are looking at the floor plan, press F12 to rebuild walls/floors/ceilings. This should correct the problem. In fact, learn F12 and use it.

Rebuilding floors/walls/ceilings using F12 does many things, but chief among them is to "clean up" problems caused when you add/change/delete elements of your plan. In fact, you may need to rebuild F/W/C in the plan in order to continue working with it. I believe that not doing this regularly is one of the reasons the program often crashes. It simply gets too confused.

But, I digress.

There will be times when the program will "complain" that the stairs are shallow. This just means there are too many risers, and you probably need to reduce that number. How many will it take? Look at the top right of the dialog box to see a good recommended number. You might want to also take the "Best Tread" advice and set your tread width to that number, but I rarely do.

So, let's look at the plan (and maybe a rendering) to see where we are.

It looks like we come up short of meeting the hallway upstairs, since we said the downstairs and upstairs halls would be overtop each other. We can make a landing at the top of the stairs to meet our stairs, but perhaps it would be easier if we simply adjusted the number of treads in each section (going with 2 and 12) and then adjusted the southern hallway wall to meet with the top tread of our stairs. So, let's do that, and remember to use the Accurate Move tool (if necessary) to move the hallway wall until it's within 1/8" of the top of the stairs. Then, adjust the width of the hall to be what we want. When we do this, we'll be ready to create a second floor.

You can see in the image above that I adjusted the height of the stairwell to exactly 13'9 and then adjusted the width of the hall to 3'3. That also made the final height of the kitchen 17'2 1/2, which is pretty good. We will definitely use this ample kitchen space wisely. But, let's move on to creating the second floor.

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