Updated 1-12-23
How to put in a safer porch, with wide landings and a shallow stair height.
⏱️⏱️Chapters⏱️⏱️
00:00 Helping an older couple with access to their tornado shelter
00:27 These steps are uneven and varying heights
00:40 With the differences, you are more likely to miss a step
01:30 First platform is framed in
02:11 How to put a porch in by yourself and keep it level
02:30 You can do increments of 3, 4, 5 then check it for square
04:30 Why I use 4x4s instead of blocks
05:25 Using cap blocks under our 4x4s
05:45 Back after putting in the 4x4s
05:55 Changed things up to make the customer safer
06:10 Much easier to cut your 4x4s and then put them up
06:25 Want to measure from block to top and add 28.5″
06:37 Don’t do 42″ because it’s too high for comfort
07:18 We have made a frame
07:47 Handrail won’t go all the way so they can get off the stair either way
08:00 We put supports in the corners
08:25 Next we’ll put in the floor
08:35 End of the job
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Today. We’re going to try to help our older couple have a little more safe way to their tornado shelters. Usually when you go to a tornado shelter, you’re not doing it in a very casual manner. you’re like in a hurry. And this is kind of the detiorating pretty bad. And what I noticed is there’s a lot of different heights.
First of all, this one is like 8, 9 inches depending on where it is. This one is six and three quarters. That one is seven and this one is two and a half, 3, 3 inches. So what happens is when you’re in a hurry, you miss a step and then you fall down. That’s a bad thing. When you fall down, and you’re older, you don’t get up as well and things come off of you when you fall, like Bill Cosby said.
So what I want to do is make a wider platform so they can literally open the door and stand on the platform and then walk toward that. And I will do it instead of seven inches, which is the normal step height. I’m going to do it in five and a half inch. So I want this step, which actually has a lip in here to be five and a half inches down to the finish.
So it’ll be seven inches when that frame is built. That we’ll build and we’ll build it out six foot, four foot wide. That’s my plan. We were going to show you how we do it as we go along.
That’s what I decided to do, is do it even though I wasn’t going to I decided to go ahead and do a six foot area, and four foot wide. So, that when we put a 4×4 here and a 4×4 there. They can come out here and actually get themselves together and then come off of here. Well, I’m looking at now is we’ve made the frame with a every two foot a stud, which that’s in the center of two foot and there’s three screws per temporally fastened to there.
I don’t rely on that. What we’ll be doing next is, of course, when you put these up temporarily, I used to do this by myself, I’d fastened it up there in a temporary fashion and then put screw in hold it up. Screw it, hold it up, screw it and then check it again, then check it for square. Now, when you check the square, you can use a framing square that be accurate, buh on a smaller area.
But you can do any increment of three or four or five. Now, okay, that sounds really simple, but it’s not. So what you do, you go inside or outside. In this case, I’m going inside. I can go three foot, which is 36, not marked on this right there. And then four foot from the inside would be too far.
So let’s go. Hmmm, let’s do done down to 30. Maybe I can catch it this way. 30. 40, 40 inches. And it should be if it’s square, it should be exactly 50, but it’s three, four or five. Any increment of three, four, five. So three foot, four foot, five foot, it can be 30 foot, 40 foot, 50 foot. And that’s a long stretch. You have a lot of sag.
You can that’s not working out real well anyways. Three, four or five, three foot, four foot, five foot. This is not big enough to do that. You would use a frame and square and then you can pick this up by yourself and move it. It might be very difficult, but you can move. I’ve moved 16 by 16 foot deck, by myself doing 16 foot sections and then you can readjust their height on that.
But it’s three foot, four foot, five foot or six foot, eight foot, ten foot. It will do that every time. Be dead on square. What we’re going to put it in the 4x4s I use instead of using which I have brand new blocks. Instead of using pier pads or pier blocks that they have or it has the 4×4 goes exactly in. I don’t like those for, uh. The biggest reason is if if it’s not if it’s when the deck settles, you can’t hardly get a shim in there.
So you get trying to end up being creative. How to how to shim it. Then you got people that like, oh, I want in concrete. Okay, here’s what happens if the water settles around that top of that concrete and it rots off the wood right there, or it just rots out the wood right there because that’s what it does.
There are exceptions when you get to bigger and bigger wood that you can, but you’re going to you’re going to look at better to have the bracket on top of concrete if you’re going to do that. But in this case, we’re not hardly having any weight at all. We’re going to put half pads with our, what they call cap blocks, which is four inch by eight, four inches by eight inches wide by 16 inches long solid.
And this is an old one and I’ll put them underneath the 4x4s that will be supporting this. And I’ll show you a picture of that.
Hi guys, we’re back, a little further along with the 4x4s in the corners. I’ve got three screws in everything. You’re going to see me doing that all the time. I changed it up. I like the idea of being able to go through there to the walkway and them have handrails on both sides closed. So I changed it so I wouldn’t have to square off and then do a jog. So how do I get the 4x4s? It’s a lot easier to cut them before you put them up there.
And then trying to take a sawzall and not cut into the house. So what I normally do is I measure up from whenever we’re level with this support here.
Measure it from the block to the top. I’m going to add 28 and a half inches, which ends up being the height, which can be 30, 32. I don’t like the 42 that they use because when you sit down either in the house or on your deck, you can’t see over the handrails. It’s not comfortable when you sit in on your chair because ends up being the glass is up here.
The arm would be right on that 30 inch, 32, 28, 29 inch area. These people are a little shorter leaning over a little bit. So I made it where it’s not very high. We’re going to put a 2×6 on top of that.
So if you notice we’ve got all this put in place and I’ll show you the next part we’re going to put on, and I’ll show you each step as we go. So what we’ve done now is make a three foot by eight foot frame. We’ve supported it here on these areas were only 5.5” inches, the thickness of this I don’t put a block because they end up being so flimsy it wouldn’t do any good to have it in there. The other side. I don’t I don’t want to.
Lose this strength where I can as far as being on the ground and I don’t want them stepping off on a higher step. So I’ve put those two on blocks and these two not. We’re going to make the handrail go to here. That way they can go this direction if they want to, or downhill, if they want to. And if you notice, of course everything is leveled up, we put in supports around here so that when we cut the two bys that we’re going to put a 2×6 and put across here, we’ll have something to sit on.
It won’t just sit floating around. This areas on the outside because I want to keep a three foot width, you know, so that they would have more width here. People can get bigger. But anyway, there’s the next step. What we’re going to go do next is put in the floor and we’re going to put the handrails.
“OK, Yep. Sorry.”
The 2x6s are what we put on top. We put a 2×4 underneath that supports the 2×6 and it’s something in case they wanted to put stas in. Put one at about seven inches so nobody slips off and also if you put the balustrades in you can fasten it to that. We 45’d this, we fastened all of the flooring with three inch, three screws each.
And this is far, I can get real fancy. It costs a lot more money. But this is way more than what they expected. So you can do the same thing. We’re all Amerians not American’ts.
