If there's one thing I love about so many of the historic homes and shops around Old Town it's their antique cast iron front stairs.

I love these types stairs so much so that we, along with our neighbors, went to great lengths to replace the 1950s brick front steps that adorned our home when we moved in with salvaged and reproduction cast iron parts and patterns from a local expert craftsman.

Today, the only thing that will tell you our stairs aren't original to our homes is the little plaque on the lower first riser that dates them to their install in 2006.

It was a significant investment of both time and money, but it's one of those unique pieces of our home that I truly stare at and appreciate almost each and every day.

That's why it pains me to report a casualty of the escalation variety in another stair set in Old Town. Don't worry, it's not our stairs that were involved, it was actually those beautiful blue stairs located on the south west corner of Washington and Duke St. The unfortunate victim of an auto accident...then an apparent contractor "accident"...several times over.

Here are the beauties, pre-accident.

Some rust and a little weathering, but in pretty great shape overall.

Just look at how sweeping and graceful they are. Curved railing, ornamental collars mid railing, intact risers and treads, all with their original patterns. You'd be hard pressed to find a more grand example of cast iron stairs anywhere in Old Town. Even the cast iron fence attached to the stairs is amazing.

But about a year ago there was a car accident at this very busy intersection that sent at least one car careening over the sidewalk and into the railing and stairs. The end result? Massive damage.

As I mentioned, this is a busy intersection, and one where accidents do happen. In fact, Wendy was involved in a pretty serious accident here this Spring when another driver ran the red light on Washington while Wendy was traveling on Duke. It's just not good. People drive too fast and don't pay enough attention.

But during last year's little car vs. stairs incident, the stairs took the brunt of the impact and were left a bit worse for the wear. Well, a "bit" is a bit of an understatement, they looked friggen horrible.

By the time I snapped a photo of the aftermath, the police caution tape already wrapped the scene like the world's worst Christmas in July gift. The stairs had been broken and battered, with several risers and stringers fractured from the force of the impact.

The brittle metal didn't stand a chance against the careening several thousand pound projectile, which also cleared a substantial length of the fencing from its century long perch.

The newel post askew, like a nearly fallen tree damaged in a raging storm. But there was no weather to blame for this damage, only a careless driver, poor reaction time, and the inevitability of Newton's 3rd law of physics...:shakes fist: damn you Newton!!!

The friendly "No Loitering" sign was added the day after the accident to ensure, perhaps, that neighborhood parties would not be taking place on the fragile stairs? There went my plans for a post happy hour gathering.

Knowing the difficulty in finding a qualified local craftsman to correct the issues caused by this massive failure in high speed human transportation, I had high hopes that the city might steer the building's owner, a small Ohio banking institution, in the right direction. I took a wait and see approach, but still hoped for the best.

Fast forward roughly 365 days and where do we stand?

Well, we're not doing very well.

At some point over the last year someone was hired to "repair" the damage, but seems to have only succeeded in causing additional damage. No attempt was made to reset the newel posts or unseated and mangled stringers, but there was a foolhardy attempt at welding the broken pieces...which immediately rusted after the untreated and poor weld was exposed to its first rain storm.

It would have been better to attempt a fix using a combination of grade school paste, some silver glitter, and dried pasta shapes.

It seems the various replacement parts and pieces have gotten more and more creative as time has gone one. What started as a simple metal garden fence to replace the ornate cast iron fence pattern...

...morphed into some white picket plastic fence in plastic shrink wrap and propped into place.

I can only hope that a portion of the fence has been removed to be sent off for replication to replace the damaged section. I've got my fingers and toes crossed for that.

And the icing on the cake, those lovely sweeping curved handrails that truly defined the stairs have been replaced by a pair of untreated straight metal pipes, clumsily bent into place and allowed to rust like the careless welds on the treads.

Please, let me take a moment to gather myself, I fear if I go any further I may make a blubbering fool of myself.

Okay, I've regained my composure enough to keep talking about it, but it won't be easy.

The intent of this blog post is not to publicly shame this organization into making the repairs this previously beautiful set of stairs requires. Not at all. This is more about chronicling the journey these poor stairs have been on, and my continued hope that the stairs will be restored. But the question that begs to be answered, where is the car insurance company's coverage in this whole endeavor? And why is it a year later, and only cheap bandaids have been slapped on?

After losing some of my initial high hopes I looked up the property owner and determined their headquarters location in Zanesville, Ohio. I was a bit discouraged by the fact it's owned by a non-local, but I trudged ahead with my plan.

Using my local knowledge of Fred Mashack, the expert craftsman responsible for so many beautiful stair repairs and builds around Old Town, and leveraging my love of all things architecturally old and pure, I penned a letter to the bank's contact to let them know how much these stairs mean to Old Town, how to contact Fred, and how we, as neighbors, are looking forward to the stair's repair.

I'm relatively certain I came across as a crazy person. Scratch that "relatively," I'm certain. But it's my hope that they will see past my crazy person persona and will use our experience and advice for good. And some day, it's my ultimate hope, that Lulu and I will be able to proudly loiter on their beautifully restored example of cast iron artistry.

A boy and his dog can dream.

What do you think? What would you put our odds at seeing these great stairs resurrected, rescued from the trash pile? Or do you think it's more likely they'll just keep adding more random stuff as temporary rehabilitation? I think an inflatable might look particularly nice perched atop the stair landing come the holiday season.

Read Full Post

When we chose salvaged cast iron stairs to replace the brick stairs and rusted railing that previously adorned the facade of our home, we knew there would be an added level of maintenance to keep them looking good. After all, you can pretty much leave brick alone and not really worry much about it, but iron and steel will rust, deteriorate, and very quickly look bad if you don't make a conscious effort to keep it looking the way it did on the day it was installed. 

We last painted the front stairs about three or four years ago, but in the last couple of months, we started to notice the wear and tear the weather, foot traffic, and afternoon to evening sun have been taking on our stairs. This weekend we took advantage of the somewhat warm, though pretty windy weather to apply another coat of paint. I'll tell you one thing, for a project that is considered routine maintenance, it sure can be a bit of a pain.

We started the project on Saturday morning. Thought it started out a bit cold, the temperature would eventually warm above 50 degrees, which is the minimum we needed to use the paint we chose. Before the sun got on the steps and warmed things up, I got started taking care of some of the basic prep work. As with any painting project (and really any project around the house), prep work is key to a job well done. And though it is key, prep work is also the most tedious and annoying of the tasks. 

The stairs were covered in dirt and pollen, so I dragged the hose around front and kicked things off with a good cleaning. It took a little over an hour getting in all of the various nooks and crannies of the treads, risers, newel posts, and rails. The cleaning alone really made the stairs look better, I couldn't believe it, but I was actually getting a little bit excited for how it might end up looking once we actually painted.

The paint we chose was the Benjamin Moore N133 Alkyd in high gloss black. The N133 is formulated for metal, which is exactly what we needed it for. If you're a long time reader, you might remember my difficulties between the C133 and N133 at our local hardware store when we were painting the front door. I went around and around with Benjamin Moore, our hardware store, and a few other local paint stores about whether the N133 could be used on wood. The end result, N133 is for Metal, C133 is for wood (but we knew that), and our Ace Hardware no longer carries the N133 because of this issue. Great, just when I actually need the N133. I was able to find a quart of the N133 at another local Benjamin Moore store, so I ran out and picked it up. When I got back to the house the sun had made it onto the stairs, the temperature warmed up above 50, and I had all of my stuff ready to go.

I had one final prep item to tackle before I could get started painting. Using some '0' steel wool, I went over the problem areas of the last coat of paint. I used the steel wool to smooth anything that was rusted, flaking, or lumpy to give the next coat a good and clean surface to adhere to. Everywhere that I sanded had a nice matte finish to it.  

Wendy and I got started applying our new and shiny coat of paint. I began on the newel posts...

...While wendy got started on the stair treads.

The goal with this project was to do an even and thin coat that will last us a good couple of years. We stretched the current coat a little longer than we should have, allowing too much to peel away or flake off. 

Our simple project was going along pretty smoothly until we hit a little snag. Well, actually, Wendy hit a little snag. I was painting along, minding my own business, when Wendy says "Oh no, I cut myself." To which I responded, "What?" It seems that Wendy was holding her brush in a manner that forced the copper base to slice into the side of her finger, resulting in a pretty decent and bloody cut. 

Seriously? Who cuts themselves on a paint brush? Wendy wiped off the blood and before she knew it it was back (and now dripping onto the paint brush). Apparently she really cut herself pretty deep. Deep enough to require a Scooby Doo band aid. Luckily, we had some of those on hand. 

With our favorite cartoon tourniquet applied, the painting itself took us a couple of hours to knock out, but on a warm sunny day out front, it sort of became a social happening. Pedestrians would comment on our efforts and how it was looking. During the process, we saw several neighbors and even had a friend or two stop over. When our friend Katie showed up, we hatched plans for our Easter brunch. Talk about multitasking. 

As we were getting close to wrapping up the painting work on the stairs, the wind started to pick up a little bit. Unfortunately, we couldn't do much to avoid the dirt and dust blowing into the paint, but I don't think it really hurt the end result all that much. Our finished stairs were shiny and black, just the want we wanted them to be.

After we painted the stairs, we also wanted to put a coat of paint on the cast iron flower urns to make sure they didn't stand out like a sore thumb from the newly painted cast iron. We followed the same basic steps on the urns as we did with the stairs. 

This type of work, thought not particularly difficult, is an annoying and sometimes painful type of work that involves squatting, laying, crawling, and groaning. 

After much complaining, we were finally able to take a step back, appreciate our completed project, and check it off of our super long list.

I have to say, a fresh coat of shiny paint on the stairs and urns paired with our shiny French doors really looks great. 

Whenever I look at our stairs, doors, detail work above the windows, house numbers, etc, and remember what our house looked like when we bought it, I'm always so proud of what we've accomplished.

So that was part of our super productive Saturday. What did you do this weekend? Was there any routine maintenance in the cards for you, or did you make some progress on a project you really wanted to work on? 

Read Full Post

We had bad front stairs, but I wanted good front stairs, but I couldn't find anywhere to get the good stairs. I almost gave up, but then we were watching This Old House's (TOH) D.C. season where Fred Mashack was doing their stairs. Through the power of the Internet, I found Fred's contact info, he came to our house, gave us an estimate that almost made Wendy pass out, but then somehow we and our neighbors agreed to go for it.

And that brings us to the actual execution of the grand front staircase plan.

After we met with Fred Mashack one more time and confirmed our intent to move forward with the project, he went back to his shop in D.C. to start working on the construction of the stairs. As much as I hated that this wasn't a DIY job, I knew there was a big role for me playing the "General Contractor," so I jumped to work on the prep and approval process that we would need to accomplish before Fred could come back for the install.

Typically, when we mention to someone that we live in an historic district and are doing work on our "antique" house, one of the first things they typically ask is "Oooohhh, do you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get approval for all of the work?" To this I respond with something along the lines of, "To be honest, no, not really. You need to get the same permits for work that requires it, just like with any other non-historic construction. Beyond that, there are a few things that need to go in front of the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), but they are just there to ensure appropriate modifications to historic structures, and are probably less restrictive than your typical HOA. Primarily it's for full or partial demolition, anything that affects the facade of your building, or changes to something visible from the street." This is an almost word for word recount of what I say. I've been asked the question so many times that I basically have this memorized.

Even though I always give my "Eh, it's no big deal" response, this is was one of those semi-major items that was going to affect the facade of our house, so we had to go in front of the BAR for review and approval of the stairs -- something that worried me a bit. On one hand, I had no doubts the project would be approved. The stairs were historically accurate, made from salvaged materials, custom built just for our house, and we would look like the rest of the neighborhood. But on the other hand, we had no proof that the house ever had stairs like them, and we had heard so many stories about otherwise inoccuous requests being denied for "no reason," and felt like all that was needed to seriously derail our project was a single neighbor that wanted to be annoying and oppose the stairs. Perhaps I was being a bit paranoid, but we'd heard things...

I decided I wasn't going to leave anything to chance, so the best opportunity we had to ensure approval of the request was to write the most complete and genuinely compelling proposal possible for presentation to the BAR. Being a software developer, I'm no stranger to creating tedious and technical proposals, so I got to work.

Step 1 - Research

Just as I had started my quest for the appropriate stairs, I once again began wandering around surrounding neighborhoods and digitally taking stock of the various newel post, tread, riser, and stringer patterns. I knew that Fred was basing the design of our stair on the following photo, so my focus was primarily on the elements associated with their stairs. 

The great thing about these stairs was that the riser, tread, and stringer (side support piece) patterns were what you most commonly see in Old Town. This meant that I would easily be able to justify why this pattern was used.

The riser pattern is fairly intricate with a number of interesting cuts. This pattern is actually what I first noticed on This Old House when Fred was working on their show. The pattern jumped out at me because I had seen it all over town. That's when I knew that he was our guy for the job.

Fred custom cuts the risers from steel with a plasma cutter and patterns that he made just for this purpose. He has several for the different patterns you find around D.C., but this is the one he always uses for Alexandria. You can also see the tread pattern with raised walk area in the photo above. 

The next significant element are the stringers along the side of the stairs. These have a pattern cut in them to give some visual interest to an otherwise unexciting portion of the stair. That's what Victorian architecture was all about, making the mundane become ornamental. 

And finally, probably the most important aspect of the stairs: the newel posts and hand rail. The newel posts Fred was using were nearly identical to the ones on the house we were using as an example. Ours would be made from a combination of salvaged materials and custom cast iron for individual element replacement (like the finials on the top).

The newel posts we were getting are some of the more decorative and ornamental ones in Old Town, but they are also consistent with several others we've seen. In addition, the handrails would be custom fabricated and the collars in the middle of the rails would also be salvaged items.

Our example home had everything we needed to make a compelling case for our install. With the research complete I moved onto...

Step 2 - Artist's Renderings

Since we weren't hiring an architect or general contractor, it was just Fred building the stairs and me doing the leg work with the city, we were at a bit of a disadvantage. The city prefers to have drawings and plans submitted to show the work that will be done. This gives everyone an accurate view of what is planned and how the execution of the project should look when completed. The problem is, professional drawings and architects are time consuming and expensive, and our budget was more than maxed out with the stairs alone. I figured I'm a DIYer and the GC on this project, so I would give the drawings a shot and hope we would be able to submit more than a napkin with a sketch on it.

Having worked in the tech world since before college graduation and building websites as a hobby since 1995, I knew my way around Photoshop a bit. So I started picking apart the photos I took of the example stairs and began a line drawing of what our stairs would look like, complete with their associated dimensions. The following is my best effort at an architectural drawing of the proposed stairs.

After that, I figured a "rendering" of what the installed stairs would look like on our house would be a good touch. Again, Photoshop was my friend. I took the stairs from the example house, edited out the stairs on our houses, and then applied the example stairs on the front of our house. Here are the original and then rendered photos.

Not to shabby, eh? "Professional" drawing: check. Cost: free (excluding the many hours of late night photoshop time I spent). Way cheaper than hiring someone, that's for sure!

Step 3 - Create the Proposal

With all of the materials we needed in hand, I was ready to start writing our proposal. I spent a couple of nights working on it. I would get home from work, watch a little TV, then work on the document. I felt like it was homework. I was horrible in school and I hated homework, but this was sort of fun. It was like homework...but I liked it. I definitely worked on this project way harder than I had ever worked on homework during any level of schooling. Sad but true.

The end result was a pretty decent proposal with photos. Not particularly long, but adequate for what we needed. If you're interested, you can read the proposal we submitted to the BAR here.

Step 4 - Lots of Paperwork

Once all of the major proposal elements were done, we had to do mountains of paperwork for the process. We needed to:

• Submit the application for the BAR hearing
• Mail letters to all of the neighbors who were either in direct contact with our property or had a line of sight from their property to the alterations
• Obtain and post a sign on the house that noted the date of the hearing
• Address any questions that came up before the hearing
• Create 12 copies of each document I submitted to take to the hearing
• File requests for various building permits since it would impact the right of way
• And other things I'm sure I forgetting

It was a lot of work, not particularly difficult, but still a lot. I can see why people like to hire this out.

Step 5 - Attend the Hearing

Our BAR hearing was quite interesting. We were nervous since we had never been to a hearing or submitted a proposal for one. This was when the wheels on our project had the potential to come off. Fred was back at the shop working on the stairs, and there was only one BAR meeting that month, so we really needed this to be approved. Our neighbors, Wendy and I had to be in attendance, and we were first up on the docket. So we all went down to City Hall and found our way to the meeting room.

Looking back on it, it really felt like a scene from Parks & Rec. There was a head table where all of the BAR members sit. This table looks out over the room full of folding chairs where everyone was sitting who had put in a request, was there to protest a request, or was just there to watch the drama.

Before getting to new items, they dealt with a few items that had been tabled since the previous meeting. One of the requests was for "demolition and encapsulation." These particular owners wanted to tear down the back portion of a home that was built around 1820 and replace the demolished portion with an addition. These people had been working on getting their plans approved for the good part of 8 months, each time having their request denied. This meeting was no different. Several neighbors and seemingly random citizens had shown up to speak in opposition of the plans. The architect and general contractor attempted to appease the crowd by offering up concessions on the fly, moving around pieces of their scale model. Each concession was only met with more opposition. It was a sight to be seen, and something that made us quite nervous. Obviously their request was far more invasive than ours, but so many people basically hated these people for the work they were trying to do. 

After the first item was denied, it was our turn, and we were sweating. They brought up our names, mentioned the proposed change, said "Any objections?" pause...pause...long pause... "No? Ok, approved." 

Wait, what? What just happened? Was it just that easy? All that worry for nothing? I like to think it was because of all of my totally awesome work on the drawings, etc. We will never know for sure, but I'll assume so. :-)

Step 6 - Install Time

With the BAR hearing behind us, we were able to move full speed ahead into the install.

I paid a visit to Fred's shop in D.C. to see the progress he had made on the stairs. Having worked in a few construction shops in college, I have to say that his place was pretty awesome. The picture of our stairs in progress should give you an idea of what his place looked like. Essentially it was a small scale industrial looking throwback of a shop, and I loved it.

It's in a bad part of D.C., right near where Nationals Park now stands. It's a lot nicer now than it was back then, but here is the current street view of the shop. 

We had to start demo on our stairs before the new ones could be installed, and what a pain in the ass the demo process was. We had several long days with a sledge hammer and Wendy lookin' sexy!

Once the old stairs and railings were removed, the old concrete under the stairs had to be cut and jackhammered away to make room for the new frame.

Fred had delivered the frame and we placed it for install. It was HEAVY! The guy who was cutting the cement above and I placed it in its intended location to make sure we had cut away enough cement. I would say that it was probably about 350-400 lbs. My back was sore for days afterwards.

It was starting to take shape, and we were ecstatic!

Fred (on the left in the photo below) came the next day and started working with his two man crew to install the stairs.

And before we knew it, they were in!

We needed to fix a little bit of brick that had broken in the process by using Aboweld 55-1, and we had to touch up some areas of the house that had never seen paint. But it was looking great!

Even though our sidewalk is cement, I have this distant longing for a brick sidewalk. Some of our neighbors have it, so there is a chance. Rather than pour concrete under the new stairs and kill any hope of ever getting a brick sidewalk, we decided to go ahead and lay brick in the void under the stairs. We had a bunch of extra bricks in the back yard that came with the house, so I put them to use.

It was my new secret spot. I laid under there for hours working on getting the bricks in the right place. All the while I could secretly listen to people talking about our house as they walked by. It was really a lot of fun.

Once the bricks were in, and the paint was on, we were finally able to take a step back and look at the end result of all of our hard work.

And, quite honestly, I am still absolutely thrilled with the project! It is one of the projects where we really went all out on it and threw caution and reasonable cost to the wind, but the end result, well, I just can't say enough about how happy I am with it. I get a little bit of joy each time I leave the house and walk down these stairs. I know that we were probably our house's only hope at getting something like this. The stars aligned and our wonderful neighbors opted to work with us on it. There is no way we could have afforded it if we hadn't been able to split the bill.

Fred was as great of a contractor as any I've ever worked with. He was reliable and did a spectacular job. He is truly a craftsman and is part of a very rare breed of people. He left a small plaque on the front of each side of the stairs.

I'm quite proud to have it on there. I just hope that in 100+ years someone can look at these stairs and know the hard work that went into their existence.

Do you have any projects that you threw caution to the wind on? Maybe said, "Ok! This is a ton of money, but...why the heck not?" We would love to hear about your project so we know we're not the only people out there devoted to crazy about their home.

Read Full Post

I have an attention to original detail that annoyingly permeates almost everything we do in our home. I will painstakingly obsess over the smallest details, especially when it comes to architectural elements and period ornamentation, usually to the point where Wendy contemplates divorce. Many of our home's true original elements have been lost over the years, but I've spent our time in the house attempting to reclaim the known character elements through salvage and restoration. I think it is well worth the trouble. Besides, with a more modest and simple home such as ours, it isn't nearly as overwhelming as it would be with a large Eastlake Victorian.

Last week we covered some of the major items we've accomplished that impact the curb appeal of our home. Within that post, a brief mention was made regarding our home's front stairs. This project, although much of it was hired out to a pro, was the single largest project to humor my obsessive attention to appropriate detail, and remains our most significant contribution to restoring a bit of period Victorian character to our home.

When we moved into our home, a large brick staircase lead to the front door of our house and our neighbor's house. It didn't strike anyone as particularly horrible or wrong, but after living in Old Town for a bit and seeing all of the other houses of similar age, I knew that something was amiss. Through as much research as we could perform, specific details of when the stairs were constructed and what stood before could not be uncovered, but it was obvious that what we had was just plain wrong. 

I decided to start looking around online and in magazines to determine a suitable replacement. Walking around our neighborhood and the rest of Old Town, it became apparent that the proper stairs were most likely a heavy cast iron configuration. 

The photo above shows the stairs that our neighbors have, and the following photo is of a large house across the street, again with a cast iron setup.

Beyond the area right around our house, all differnt styles of cast iron stairs can be found, each similar but with unique characteristics, from small and simple to large and grand. 

As you can see, many have similar cast iron stairs with slight variations in the newel posts, risers or paint color.

Through our research we came across a few different options that ranged from custom-made wrought iron railings on stone or wood stairs, stamped metal stairs, spiral stairs, and beyond. But in the cast iron stair department, I kept coming across a Canadian company named Steptoe and Wife. They have a model called the "Kensington" that is a heavy cast iron stair based on a multi-part assembly of individual pieces. The pattern they use for their stairs was created as a replica of stairs from a Canadian foundry. I was going in the right direction, but the look wasn't historically accurate for our area. 

I paid close attention to all of the various patterns of risers, treads, and newel posts on our many evening walks, hoping to see the Kensington style stairs on an older home. I was able to find several installs all around town, but unfortunately they were all on row homes built from the 1970s and beyond. It seemed that Steptoe was the only option for a very long time.

Feeling a little discouraged that I couldn't find an example, I finally stumbled on a house of a similar age to ours that had the Steptoe stairs. 

There had been a car accident in front of this house back in the 1980s that took out the original stairs on this and the next three houses. Each homeowner at the time had the opportunity to choose the replacement. The first house used Steptoe and Wife products, while the remaining used salvaged materials. I don't really think the picture clearly shows what was obvious to me, but the first example just doesn't fit with all of the rest of Old Town. Only the salvaged stairs really look like they belong. I know this is completely and totally obsessive, but I wanted to find something that looked original, not almost original. 

So, having decided that the one supplier I had found was not a good match, we casually looked for stair parts at area salvage yards, but we were quite discouraged and figured we would need to do a stone or hybrid stone and salvaged materials approach like some of the following examples. 

Fast forward to early 2006. Wendy and I were thrilled when This Old House's (TOH) Season 27 focused on a dilapidated D.C. row house built in 1879.

Each week we eagerly anticipated each episode just to see what we could recognize from the area. We also enjoyed the renovation since the age and location of the home were so similar to our house (though we didn't care for the thorough gut job the house had to undergo). Then, we caught the lucky break our stairs needed. 

Many D.C. residences in the historic neighborhoods have iron stairs similar to what you see around Alexandria. It makes sense, since there were probably only a handful of local iron foundries selling stair kits back in the late 1800s. As a result, if you take a stroll around the various historic neighborhoods of D.C., you will probably see patterns of newel posts, risers, and treads that are similar to the neighbor's. Well, the house being profiled on the D.C. season of TOH happened to be one with a large cast iron stair that was in really bad shape.

The TOH crew brought in a local craftsman, Fred Mashack, owner of Fred Mashack Iron Works, to give the deteriorated and unsafe stairs the TLC they needed. To say we were intrigued is quite an understatement. They were looking at the stairs when noticed what I was seeing and yelled "HOLY CRAP! That's the same style of risers around here!"

I immediately jumped onto the This Old House website to look up the contractor list for the season. To my joy, Fred's phone number and address were available and I gave him a call the very next day. About a week later Fred came out to our house to look at what we had going on and to provide us with an estimate. If you have ever had the chance to work with him, you know that Fred is a great guy who seems to love his work. First we looked at the stairs we had and our immediate neighbors' stairs, then we took a walk around the blocks surrounding our house to look at other examples to see what was appropriate.

Remember the photo from above where the car accident had taken out the stairs in the 1980s? Well, we came around the corner where those houses are, and Fred said "Wait a second, I've worked in this area before. See those three stairs there? I built those a long time ago." It seems that three of the four houses with the new/salvaged stairs had hired Fred to do the work. How fortuitous, right? Here is a photo of his handy work from a few decades ago.

One of the primary issues with our stairs had to do with the proximity of our front door to our neighbor's door. As you can see from the first photo on this post that the space is really only a couple of inches. There is no way we could only replace our stairs, it had to be a package deal where we would replace both at the same time. Luckily, there was a stair on two houses with very similar age and architecture to our's that we could use as an example. 

We talked with our neighbors about the possibility of replacing the front stairs and splitting the cost of the work. Luckily for us, they were on board with at least getting an estimate.

During our meeting with Fred he threw out a ballpark cost for the work. If I'm remembering correctly, Wendy's response was "Well...ok, so much for that, thank you for your time."  Apparently custom fabricated cast iron stairs from salvaged materials do not come cheap! As Wendy went inside and I got over the shock of the estimate, I told Fred we'd talk it over and would be in touch.

Not expecting either ourselves or our neighbors to go for the idea of spending a large amount of money on replacing stairs that were, by definition of stairs, perfectly functional, we still discussed our findings with them. Somehow, by some strange chain of events, we found ourselves in a renovation perfect storm. As a naive young couple, we were apparently foolish enough to sink a chunk of our savings into a completely aesthetic upgrade, and our neighbors, who also had the money available and passion for better curb appeal, also opted to go ahead with the upgrade. This is just one of many reasons why we really loved these neighbors.

A few days later I gave Fred a call and started the process for the project. However, before the work could begin we would need an approval from Alexandria's Board of Architectural Review (BAR), which we had always understood to be an intimidating and difficult process. But I'll save that for part two of this post. We still had a long road ahead of us, but the first steps of a) identifying a contractor that would be able to do the work, and b) agreeing to the project with our neighbors, were behind us.

For good measure, I'll leave you with a few more photos of stair configurations below. What steps (no pun intended) have you taken to improve the curb appeal of your home? Oh, and just for the record, it was at Wendy's insistence that I included an NKOTB reference in the title of this post. I guess I'm not the only dork on our crew. 

Continue to part two...

Read Full Post