Immediately January 1 we started creating the outdoor stairs to the yoga/meditation sala on the first floor. We have great weather now to do construction work with temperatures in the morning of around 14 degrees C and during the day around 30.
It's the second time in my life I am building a staircase. During my studies constructional engineering and architecture I learned constructing a staircase in a building is one of the most difficult parts to do. Not only because of the measurements to walk smoothly up and down. It's also an art to do it the right way and, if you want, to make something special (as we wanted).
The first stairs I created (drawing and construction), working for the Dutch Ballast-Nedam firm, was in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. The drawings I made myself. After that I was the superintendent for the construction with a team of workers from Korea and Thailand.
For residential developments staircases mostly are prefabricated in a factory. Computers, machines and even robots fix the staircase in the right dimensions and the prefabricated stairs are fit at the right time in the building process. The first rise can be a bit lower or higher because of setting these stairs.
For our house we need to do all this work by hand ourselves to make it tailor made. Happy I made the drawings myself as part to get building permission three years ago. They, now, helped me a lot in measuring, cutting, grinding, welding, etc..
First I thought about the idea to make an 'easier' stair but after a while I stuck to the original plan again. A kind of art and indeed a lot of work. But 'building as meditation' I called it six year ago at the start of the process.
We constructed a so called "Low-pitch" / "Easy" stair. And... all the individual rises at our staircase are exactly the same. The pitch/slope is 39 degrees what makes it, getting older, easier to use. To create that we needed to make a half-landing in between.
Living in Thailand, so far, I did not find a public building with the right (read same) size of the unit rises and runs/goings. This does not make walking up and down comfortable and, I think, in some situations (especially for the elderly) it can even be dangerous. Over and over again I am wondering why these stairs to make did not get a bit more attention.
See some step-by-step pictures of the process so far to get an idea.
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| Half landing |
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| (connection to the copper earth electrode) |
And sometimes, having drawings or not, you still make a mistake. Human error, I created 1 step too much.
A matter of cutting the weld and shorten the prework you did already with one step and reinstall at the new place. After that, still to do, polishing and filling the holes I drilled in the floor in the same color. Happy it's still man-made.
Frans & Phatsamon
