Who’d have thought stairs could be so problematic? To be honest, I’ve never really given stairs a lot of thought, because they’re just…there. But our stairs need a lot of thinking about, because they’re pretty unusual. We have one set going upstairs from the living room, and another going down into what will become The Snug, from the living room. They are both open staircases, and I read on a website that these…
provide a sense of freedom, as open stairs do not feature risers, allowing you to look through the staircase enjoying the rest of an interior…
All well and good, BUT when they have been quite poorly installed, and the treads are very narrow, and there is no handrail and the banister at the top of the stairs – to prevent anyone falling – is very rickety, all of a sudden, that “sense of freedom” doesn’t quite seem a selling point.
We’ve looked at having both sets replaced, and maybe it’s a language thing and we keep getting lost in translation but we’re finding it to difficult to get across what we want. And, for some reason, stairs (or the construction of), seem to be prohibitively costly in Istria. We originally had someone out to quote on concrete stairs. My dream, but these must stay as a dream as we wouldn’t be able to afford to eat if we went with his quote.
But, if we are to live a comfortable life and be able to get up and down the stairs with ease – and be sure that our guests will be safe – we need to arrive at a solution. Currently, they are quite awful – half finished, cheap looking and fairly poorly fitted. It’s a job which has been added to the ever-growing list and which we are fairly confident will be shunted down when other projects become more of a priority. In the meantime, we’ll just watch our feet and try not to climb or descend after a drink too many.