Steep steps of stairs

chirp

Most houses seem to have badly designed and dangerous staircases. The steps are not deep enough for a grown man to place his whole foot properly. And if they are carpeted then their depth is decreased even more due to the carpet thickness. This increases the danger of people falling down the stairs due to not being able to place their whole foot properly on each step. Can steps be made deeper on a staircase that has already been built?

pimento

Stairlift or bungalow, I reckon.

pinkshoes

If you're renting the property, NO - go rent elsewhere!!

If you own it, then you'd have to see if there was space to move the staircase.

Annisele

You don't need to be able to place your whole foot on a step to use it properly.

There's more than you ever needed to know about stairs here. It suggests steps 23cm deep are fine for stairs in houses.

But to answer the question - not without moving the staircase.

leveller2911

chirp wrote: »

Most houses seem to have badly designed and dangerous staircases. The steps are not deep enough for a grown man to place his whole foot properly. And if they are carpeted then their depth is decreased even more due to the carpet thickness. This increases the danger of people falling down the stairs due to not being able to place their whole foot properly on each step. Can steps be made deeper on a staircase that has already been built?

Maximum pitch (angle) of a new staicase is 42 degrees which IMO is not too steep.If you build a house and have the space you can make it as 30 degrees if you want to but it would take up a lot of room. The minimum width of a stair tread for a new stairscase is 220mm and has a maximum rise (height) of 220mm these are just about right IMO.
Treads (steps) can't be made wider on an existing staircase because if you add to the front of the tread you reduce the width of the next tread down.
If you build your own house you can have 300mm wide treads if you want but you would need a lot of space given the standard staircase straight flight has about 13 treads x 300mm would take up nearly 4m of room on the wall ...

jc808

chirp wrote: »

And if they are carpeted then their depth is decreased even more due to the carpet thickness. This increases the danger of people falling down the stairs due to not being able to place their whole foot properly on each step.

But the treads above below will have the same thicknesses so your rise will remain the same - only the headroom over the pitch will decrease (Say 6.4 foot as opposed to 6.45 foot lets say)

Oh and to answer your other question, you can rebuild your whole house if you want but its expensive

Running_Horse

It might be possible to remove the upright, and have your foot go under the stair above, but you would have to keep moving your foot back before raising it, and no doubt there would be technical difficulties. Our holiday cottage had extremely steep steps, but to rebuild would have lost very valuable space in a tiny house. By the end of the week we had adapted with care, and you just get used to what you have.

tyllwyd

It is all going to depend on the actual set of stairs that you are talking about. It should technically be possible to remove a staircase and replace it with another one, but if you want to replace a steep staircase with one with wider steps, you are going to need some extra room from somewhere.

My mum & dad took out the staircase from their house and put in a new one but they had to take an extra bit out of the landing to fit it in. And it has caused problems with headroom at one point, which is another issue to think about. Building regs will cover the design of any new staircase that you put in.

So the answer to your question is maybe, but it needs planning carefully and wouldn't be cheap.

maninthestreet

Have you conisdered one of these? :

pinkteapot

Most people manage stairs just fine; there doesn't seem to be an epidemic of people falling down them. If you have any particular reason to feel unsafe on them (balance problems, disability etc) then a stairlift is the best way to go. For the stairs to be at a shallow enough incline for you to feel safe, the staircase would probably be wider than your house.

poppysarah

Some of the old terraces near us have horrid steep stairs but I don't hear about many people breaking their necks on them so they can't be that bad.