Rooms / the boys’ room / the storage stair

The storage stairbuild sheet

A stair whose steps are the shelving. One cell is one run wide by one rise tall, so every divider lands under a riser and every shelf lands under a tread — 45 cells, and nothing left over to fill.

This is the working sheet, not a case study. It is generated from the design script every time the design moves, which is why it can be trusted on a bench: the page, the cut list and the 3D model are the same numbers. The room it belongs to is here, and the model is live here.

9 risers × 6.7708  ·  8 treads × 10.5  ·  landing 14  ·  98 long  ·  29 slot  ·  32.8°  ·  15/32" BCX carcass

spine — the continuous middle ply upright — what a shelf lands on shelf & tread shelf pine tread and riser 2x4 header over the crawl space

Set out — off the west wall and the slab

Every line is measured from the wall and every height from the slab. Nothing is stacked off the piece below it, which is what keeps a 15/32 sheet’s error landing once instead of nine times.

Grid lines — the west face of each laminate column

Each column is 1-13/32 of plywood: upright, spine, upright. The ¾ riser face lands immediately east of each one.

• L00
• L111-7/8
• L222-3/8
• L332-7/8
• L443-3/8
• L553-7/8
• L664-3/8
• L774-7/8
• L885-3/8
• L996-5/16

Tread tops — the story pole

True rise 6.7708. Do not stack 6-3/4 nine times.

• 16-3/4
• 213-9/16
• 320-5/16
• 427-1/16
• 533-7/8
• 640-5/8the lower deck — the entry
• 747-3/8
• 854-3/16
• 960-15/16the upper deck — the landing

Fastening — glue and nail

The load is on bearing, not on fasteners: a shelf lands on an upright, the next upright stands on the shelf, and the spine runs past continuous. So a fastener here is a clamp that holds a glue joint shut while it cures — which is what a brad does well and a screw does badly.

Into an edge — not a length problem, a wander problem

A brad fired into a 15/32 plywood edge can curl and exit a face, into a cubby. Feel every cubby with a bare hand before a book or a crate goes in.

The order — west to east, tallest to lowest

Day one is the base and the crawl space: a tunnel through the bottom of the landing column joining the nook under one bed to the cave under the other, on three 2x4 headers.

Then a column at a time, from the wall: the spine of the line east of it, continuous; the centre divider on edge up the middle; then layer by layer — the uprights on both faces, and the shelves that land on them; and the column’s top, which is a tread shelf. Pine last — risers then treads, bottom up. Cut the treads, risers and landing 28-7/8 and scribe: they are drawn 29 = the full slot, and 29 is the slot’s tightest reading.

One column, close up

The landing column, drawn from the same pieces as the cut list. A line cannot go up before its column: the uprights are broken at every shelf and stand on it, so only the spine is continuous. Every column after this one goes together the same way.

The cut list

11 sheets of 15/32" BCX (sold as ½, taped at 15/32) — buy 12. Sizes are the cut size. Straightedge is the cut size − or + 4-1/2, the track saw’s blade-to-straightedge offset: set the straightedge at that number from the same edge the cut is measured from. − when the track sits on the keep side of the line, + when it sits on the offcut side. A dash means the cut is narrower than the offset; reference that one off the opposite edge.

Pine