Giant Steps

Welcome to our front yard! And welcome to our front door that leads to nowhere, miles and miles up in the air now that our house is sitting up on its flamingo legs.

Considering that our only access into the house right now is this set of stairs tied to the back of the house (yes, TIED to the house), we decided that it was time to knock off another item from our Big List.

Front stairs.

So! We took a little walk around the neighbourhood with Allie to see what other weatherboard houses like ours had in the way of front stairs.

The nice ones are made entirely of timber, and would need to be made using side pieces like these on the right, where the stair treads themselves notch into the angled pieces.

Sourced from Alibaba

Considering that our carpentry confidence is still not particularly high, we were feeling pretty nervous about trying to accomplish that by ourselves. Plus, those big angled side pieces should be made of hardwood, and that means a nice high price tag!

And then we saw another option on our little neighbourhood walk.

Sourced from Scott's Metals

Cheeky people still had timber stair treads, but these pre-fabricated steel "stringers" doing the majority of the work.

I wasn't a huge fan, since you could still see the steel, but we figured if we were really clever we could get some angled timber pieces in a light timber (like pine) and cover up the sides of the steel so no-one would ever know we'd cheated and gone with steel!

We called a few places for pricing and were pleasantly surprised to hear that the steel would only cost us about $500 for the stringers. Although we would still need to buy nice chunky pieces of hardwood for the steps, so it was still not going to be a cheap exercise.

And then... drum roll... Tom found these.

He was doing a little search on Gumtree, our secondhand supplies BFF, and spotted these amazing hardwood stairs.

A set of six steps...

And a set of fifteen.

So very very close to what we needed, and for the unbelievable price of...can you believe it...$600!!!

Tom practically fell over himself getting the address so he could go and slap a "SOLD" sticker on them. Or even better, just take them away so noone else could get a peek at them.

 As you can see, he couldn't wait to test them out.

Aren't they beauuuutiful?!!

We can't believe it. They're solid as a rock, and as heavy as one too. They are so perfect for us, and even if they weren't, we'd be adjusting our plans for the price of $600!

Our poor lonely front door's lonely days are numbered.

We still can't believe it. Did I mention that?