Amateur carpenters who have laid out the cuts in a stair stringer (the zig-zag structural support for the steps) know the queasy feeling that bubbles up at the prospect of this job. There’s the simple ...

You may be like most folks. I’m guessing you give very little thought to the stairs you go up and down on a regular basis.

To lay out a set of stair stringers from scratch requires a little math, but not much. Equally important is some quiet time to run the numbers and at the same time to think about the construction ...

I need to build some simple outdoor steps to replace ones that fell apart and rotted (even though they were made with treated lumber). I’m fairly handy and have a decent grasp of the math but would ...

Simple stairs have just two components. The flat board that your foot steps on is called a tread. The treads connect to side stringers and sometimes to one that is in the middle of the stairs. The ...