Right to the millimetre, or it is wrong.
Taylor Joinery are joiners and carpenters across Halifax and the Calder Valley. Stairs, kitchens, wardrobes, floors, loft conversions and timber frame — first fix and second.
A staircase is the clearest case of what the trade actually is. Four separate rules have to come out right at the same time, on a height nobody measured properly, in a space that was never drawn.
Every riser the same, to the millimetre.
Your foot learns the first step and then stops looking. One riser six millimetres out from the rest is the one people trip on, every time, for the next forty years.
So a flight is not designed around a nice round number. It is designed around the real floor-to-floor height, divided by a whole number of risers.
The going is what your foot lands on.
Measured from the face of one riser to the face of the next. Not the width of the tread — the nosing overhangs, and an overhang is not somewhere to stand.
Make it generous and a stair feels like a staircase. Make it tight and it feels like a ladder, and everybody comes down it sideways.
Rise and going together decide the angle.
You do not choose the pitch. It falls out of the other two, which is exactly why pushing one of them tends to break this one.
It is where most stair ideas come apart. A taller riser buys you fewer steps and a shorter flight, and then the angle goes past what is allowed.
Then a fourth rule nobody expects.
Two rises plus one going has to land between 550 and 700mm. It is a stride-length check, and it is the one that catches a flight after it has passed everything else.
Widen the going to rescue the pitch and you can push this straight out of range. The four rules are not a checklist. They are a knot.
The number that catches people out is the floor it eats.
A flight can satisfy all four rules and still be the wrong flight, because it finishes a metre into the room you wanted a door in.
Which is why the run gets drawn before anything is ordered, and why a landing, a winder or a turn is a decision taken early rather than a rescue taken late.
The half of the job that gets touched every day.
Newels, strings, spindles and handrail. Nobody runs a hand along a riser. The handrail is what the house gets judged on, and it is the part that shows a poor joint from across a room.
New flights, replacement balustrades, or new spindles and handrail on a flight that is sound underneath.
Put your own measurement in.
Floor finish to floor finish, as it really is rather than as the drawing said.
