Notes from Windward: #67

 

A Spiral Staircase for the Cabin

opening up more space on the main floor


  January 22:

     Now that the cabin is closed in, we're kicking around how to proceed on finishing the interior. Jacque came up with the idea that if we moved the staircase, there would be more room on the main floor. The challenge then was to find a way to do that without broaching any of the trusses that support the second floor. After a couple of weeks of discussion, Susan came up with the idea of replacing the linear staircase with a spiral one, and after doing some research we've come to a consensus that a spiral staircase is the way that we want to go.

  


     The way the stairs are currently laid out, they take up a lot of space right in the center of the cabin. By replacing them with a spiral staircase, we'll be able to take out both the stairs and the wall you see in the pic above thereby greatly increasing the first floor's usable space.

     A change of this scale will require us to reroute a good deal of the wiring in that area, but that's okay. One of the benefits of doing the work ourselves is that we can take whatever time we need to get it right, and when it becomes evident that a project underway needs to back up and go in another direction, well we can do that too.

     We've never installed a spiral staircase before so we'll be feeling our way into this project cautiously, but it's clear that the first step is to remove the existing straight staircase.

Todd planning out the removal of the staircase
  



Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 67