Building Steps Deck

Outdoor projects, ideas and tips for your garden, landscaping, decks, patio, water features and garden structures.

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Building a staircase, even a short one, isn't simple. It requires precise measurements and some careful calculations. From a technical standpoint, there's nothing particularly difficult about building stairs for a deck, porch or shed. Anyone with basic carpentry skills can make the necessary cuts and assemble the parts.

I've been building stairs inside homes and on decks for almost 30 years. There are lots of viable methods that avoid the pitfalls that lead to uneven risers, tilted staircases, and downright collapses; in this article, I describe my practices for building a set of stairs with cut stringers (stringers notched out for treads and risers), probably the most common type of stringers used on decks.