We’ve been under roof at our latest spec house in Belmont for a good two weeks or so, but really haven’t had a chance to really appreciate it. We’ve been busy racing to finish our house on Sun Ridge Road and get a second house going in Belmont for winter.

In the last day or so, Bryce and Jeff were able to sneak back over there and build steps to the second floor. Typically, we’ve gotten pre-built stairs made that we just pop into place, but we wanted to break up the monotony and try and build something from scratch.

In particular, I’ve always wanted to build a proper open tread stair that feels like it is floating out of the wall. This is the perfect house for it as we have switch back stairs with a landing that has 5′ wide by 10′ tall window. The large window not only gives nice moment of pause to take in a little league game from the landing, but also has great morning light. With the open tread stairs, we are able to bring a lot of that light into the kitchen and dining area.

There was probably a way to build this with less wood, but we built a platform for each step. Then, not to make it a nightmare later for our drywall guys, we went ahead and put up drywall. We then notched out the drywall and slipped in the treads. We used 9 1/2″ wide by 1 3/4″ microlams. We will eventually wrap them all the way around with 3/4″ material that I will think will give a nice mass to each tread.