I can tell that a lot of houses here also have this.. Anyway, if you grow up with it you can’t imagine it’s hard to climb them. Add message | Report | See all Lizcat Mon 05-Dec-11 14:15:20 Old houses didn’t have air conditioning and therefore have vastly more windows to help keep the structure cool on muggy summer nights. She is 80+, and not very agile any more – dreading the day that she misjudges the stairs…, It’s funny because most other people have trouble going up the stairs in my house and look terrified, while i love running up and down the stairs and sounding like a giant doing it . Ugh! ... 22 Tiny Houses We Love. Does Your Home Have Random Toilet in the Basement? How aptly named, for they are a trap indeed, of the death-trap variety!! I could deal with the neighbour’s lack of curtains and the stinky herring stall below. Oh god I just cursed us. So yeah. Fix STEEP Basement Stairs. I live alone on the third floor of a building with no elevator and high ceilings. My Code Story: Our cellar stairs had been built out of wood, right on the dirt, and were on their last legs. They are very steep and curve too. So, since the minimum tread size is 10”, a nosing will extend the tread depth to between 10-3/4” and 11-1/4”. I don’t believe this can only be found in Amsterdam, but everywhere in the Netherlands. We might admire their handsome balustrades and swoon over their spiral forms, but we're also likely to abuse them without so much as a second thought—tromping up and down them like stampeding elephants, or tugging heavy items over them one step at a time. If you want more attractive stairs for the interior of your house, use hardwood. Restructuring a steep staircase usually means the loss of living space on one or both of the floors connected by the staircase. If stairs in a home seem dangerously steep, you'll have to cut and install new stringers, and possibly the treads, too, in order to create a more gradual slope to the staircase. 24 of 35. An under-the-stairs nook off the foyer is the kind of odd space old houses are prized for. Visiting me at a friends place, my mother found this even more scary as she was scared of heights. Here's how you can make them steep stairs safer. Now that they are a … Curved staircase design that doesn't occupy much floor space but looks trully amazing. (“It’s really more like a ladder”, my mother said.) Sorry, I have no idea what the exact width of these particular stairs was. However, extending the nosing too far, which was sometimes done on excessively steep stairs of old houses, creates a protrusion that is a trip hazard when ascending or descending the stairs. stairs. The flat faced the park and had a lovely facade wonderful layout (recently refurbished with a spacey feel), but the walk to the 1st floor was almost climbing a ladder that skewed to the left as you got higher. That old law could explain why old Dutch houses were so narrow. Another funny Dutch one is their hilariously small toilets, best known for knees against the door posture. I’m not complaining, I think saving some space in a country as full as this one is probably a good thing, and so is acquiring the balance and motor skills required for dealing with these stairs. Steep and cramped, they were space-efficient but difficult to ascend, making them defensible against intruders. Jul 18, 2015 - How to Make Steep Interior Stairs Bigger. Lol. You can still see these beams with a hook above the attic window on the facade of many houses in Amsterdam. I live in a very Dutch city in the US, we even have a tulip festival where we all dress up in traditional Dutch costumes and dance around on the streets in wooden shoes for a week (Yes, we are all in counseling), My Grandmother’s father (who was born in the Netherlands) built her house and they had these stairs!!! One of those odd quirks that you won’t find in a new home is a steep staircase. Just saying: the rest of the Netherlands is not entirely different from Amsterdam at least in this one point. Safe? We repair iPhones in Hilversum. These narrow houses are also very deep, so if the stairs went from the front of the house (bottom) to the back (top) they would be almost flat. Many old homes have stairs that are so steep they could almost be called “sloping ladders.” In the case above, the treads measure 9½-inches, but with nosing subtracted, this run is only 8½. I’m an American who has lived extensively in France, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the Netherlands. Here is your inspiration photo drawn with a 7 3/16" rise and a 10 1/2" run. Back at the boyfriends house, his room was up in the attic, and coming down the stairs on the 1st day I was there I tripped and fell until I reached the 2nd floor. Always be smart about under stairs storage. Like narrow staircases if you want more attractive stairs for the impossible steep and made no.... 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