Stairway with 176 feet of drop.......

[Larry Edgerton]

I got a call for a stairway to run down a bank to Lake Michigan 176 feet below the house. Out of Teak! I though about it for a couple of days, but I am just too old for this kind of project. The bank is so steep that standing up is a problem, if you drop a tool it will be down at the bottom, if you need a tool, it will be all the way to the top. Plus it involves every government agency from the code department to the EPA because it is on a scenic lakeshore. The view is great, I am working on the same section of beach now, but the weather can be brutal.

First time I will be passing up a challange. The mind is willing, but the body, not so much.

[keith micinski]

I say you do it. Getting older can't be an excuse for not doing things. The one inevitable thing in life is that you are going to get older and if you let it limit you then the older you get the less you will have. The body's natural defense mechanism as it ages is to withdraw and retreat to experience. You have to fight through that other wise your giving in.

[Kent A Bathurst]

Yeah, Larry.......those aren't banks, they're cliffs. The views are beautiful, though.

Sounds like you'd need a couple high school football players as your gophers - boys that age will do anything for a chance to earn gas money, and their coach likely has them run stairs for conditioning anyway. Also - you could sell the rights to the "perpetual care" of the stairway - those cliffs have an annoying habit of eroding over time.

Had to be a tough call to turn it down. Good luck on your other projects, though...............

[Anthony Whitesell]

I am not sure. The mind may not want to take on the licensing/permitting aspect.

I'll second the statement "Getting older can't be an excuse for not doing things". A friend of mine is a member of a electricals local union. A group of us was talking about retiring and retirement when he mentioned that the average number of bi-weekly retirement checks the union sends to a retired member is 14. 14*2=28 weeks. They have a eerie streak of retire and be dead in 6 months. So keep active to some extent. If it's summer time, find a nice helpful high schooler that needs a part time job and let them run up and down the stairs.

[Ed Labadie]

Don't blame you a bit Larry. I went down/up the stairs at Lumbermens Monument last weekend, vertical drop is 200'
Felt sorry for the folk that built it, not a project I would want to tackle.

Ed

[Richard Wolf]

Most likely your smartest thing you have done, passing it up. Sometimes our ego gets in the way of our brain.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

While you do have to fight aging, one of the biggest and most common gripes I heard among the staff while working in hospitals for 34 years was about the old guys coming into the ER because they had tried to do more than their aging bodies were capable of doing.

[David Thompson 27577]

On jobs like that one, material handling can be a pure pain! You mentioned that every tool you need will be at the top. So will every board, and probably the chop saw station too.

Leaving this for a younger crew would have been my decision too.

[Rick Moyer]

I say you do it. Getting older can't be an excuse for not doing things. The one inevitable thing in life is that you are going to get older and if you let it limit you then the older you get the less you will have. The body's natural defense mechanism as it ages is to withdraw and retreat to experience. You have to fight through that other wise your giving in.

My lower back this morning, after shoveling two tons of dirt yesterday, respectfully would like to disagree with you!

[Ole Anderson]

176 vertical feet of stairway is hard enough to imagine, but out of TEAK? Bet they change their mind when they get a price. According to Johnson's, Teak will be about $20/BF. You could do Ipe' for 1/3 the cost and still end up with a set of primo stairs. http://www.theworkbench.com/pdf/current.pdf

Anyone care to venture a guesstimate of the cost of those stairs in Teak (labor + material)?

I'm betting they would be better off looking at some type of mechanical incline.

[David Epperson]

But you could slip a bug into a Boy Scout Troop leader for a possible Eagle Scout Project and be a mentor. LOL. All you end up having to do then is point fingers and tell 'em what needs done.

[David Helm]

I'm with you Larry. All due respect Keith, but bowing to reality is smart. Near the end of my building career I too turned down just such a job for similar reasons. Interestingly, about a year later I got a request to bid on a similar job. I did a real bid with actual price estimates and found that the guy thought he could get it for cheap. When he saw the price we both agreed that he didn't really need the steps that bad. Seriously, we can keep very active as we age without endangering ourselves.

[Ruhi Arslan]

One of our cousins has a cottage by the Lake up near Manistee. The stairs which is about 180ft or so with a landing in the mid point had to be repaired when they bought it. Cost 'em pretty penny and didn't turn out to be be well repaired at the end. My mother-in-law now wants to buy the next door with no stairs to speak of. I talked her out of it once I explained to her the complications with the regualtions and the construction that would involve.

[Matt Kestenbaum]

I'd say you just haven't found the right couple of summer interns to work with! (I sort of had the same idea as David suggesting Scout Troup) Summer jobs getting to build stuff in a great scenic setting like that seem harder to come by than ever. You might change a young man's (or woman's) life with a love of working wood. And I've seen a few old guys benefit from having some youthful energy around too.

[Steve Griffin]

Smells like money to me. Are you really too old to manage the project?

The fact that it requires a ton of permits and hassles and involves a steep hillside might be the best thing about it--it rules out the "wanna be" contractors and opens up some room for you to make some good money.

No need to carry a single board--find a talented crew and run it from your office.
This is no place for high school kids/scout groups. You need experience to do it well and safely. Pay them well and bid it high enough to make some money.

-Steve

[John Cooper2]

Steve,

Best advice so far for sure,

Lots of legwork for sure, but could all be done without climbing the steps or the hill once. Let the younger crowd do the grunt work.

[Frank Drew]

This is no place for high school kids/scout groups. +1,000.

The suggestions to bring a bunch of inexperienced kids onto this complex, difficult and potentially very hazardous job ... what could possibly go wrong with that? :rolleyes:

Saying "I'm too old for that" is often short hand for "I'm just fine with what I'm doing right now, don't particularly want any new headaches in my life, and I think I know just how big a headache this [whatever] will turn out to be." In other words, it's probably best let Larry be the judge of the kinds of jobs he wants to take on.

[Chip Lindley]

I got a call for a stairway to run down a bank to Lake Michigan 176 feet below the house. Out of Teak! I though about it for a couple of days, but I am just too old for this kind of project. The bank is so steep that standing up is a problem, if you drop a tool it will be down at the bottom, if you need a tool, it will be all the way to the top. Plus it involves every government agency from the code department to the EPA because it is on a scenic lakeshore. The view is great, I am working on the same section of beach now, but the weather can be brutal.

First time I will be passing up a challange. The mind is willing, but the body, not so much.

Youngsters do lots of things "because they DON'T know any better." Maturity allows us to "NOT do things because we DO know better." When we have come this far, we KNOW there are other ways to make a living without risking life and limb. We do not have to prove anything! I feel for those who MUST keep risking their health under pressure to make a living, having no other choice.

For 25+ years I have chainsawed and split by hand all my winter firewood. Finally, this year at age 63, I opted for a hydraulic wood splitter. I have the "Wheaties" to chainsaw all day, but can easily forego the splitting. I paid my dues.

P.S. This "stair job" sounds more like an "elevator job!"

[Pat Barry]

176 feet vertical drop is probably something like 300+ steps. It the equivalent of an 18 story building. IF it gets built, the proud owners will use it a maximum of three times before they realize its much simpler to get in their beemer and drive 20 miles to the nearest beach.

[Ole Anderson]

176 feet vertical drop is probably something like 300+ steps. It the equivalent of an 18 story building. IF it gets built, the proud owners will use it a maximum of three times before they realize its much simpler to get in their beemer and drive 20 miles to the nearest beach.

That is why a mechanical incline would make a lot of sense. Your average wealthy Joe probably doesn't even know that is a possibility. Now a nice Teak or Ipe' deck at the top, middle and bottom might be a manageable project for the OP, after of course the incline is completed.

http://www.marineinnovations.com/content.php?page=engineering

http://www.marineinnovations.com/images/stored/pictures%20012.jpg

[John TenEyck]

Smells like money to me. Are you really too old to manage the project?

The fact that it requires a ton of permits and hassles and involves a steep hillside might be the best thing about it--it rules out the "wanna be" contractors and opens up some room for you to make some good money.

No need to carry a single board--find a talented crew and run it from your office.
This is no place for high school kids/scout groups. You need experience to do it well and safely. Pay them well and bid it high enough to make some money.

-Steve

That is the only way I'd do a job like that. I'd want to be paid for my design, permitting and management expertise, not my physical labor. I turned down a job right after I retired to build a bar room (a room about 25 x 40 ft, bar, sink, paneled walls, soffits, etc.) for a colleague of mine. My ego got in the way for about a week until the reality of moving all those tons of materials struck home. I thanked him for the offer but said no. I was instantly happier. Later that summer, he called me to ask me to build tables for his new bar. That was a job I happily accepted.

[Myk Rian]

Hang an I-beam out from the top, and attach a hot air balloon basket elevator to it. Kinda like a barn loft.

[Curt Harms]

I am not sure. The mind may not want to take on the licensing/permitting aspect.

I'll second the statement "Getting older can't be an excuse for not doing things". A friend of mine is a member of a electricals local union. A group of us was talking about retiring and retirement when he mentioned that the average number of bi-weekly retirement checks the union sends to a retired member is 14. 14*2=28 weeks. They have a eerie streak of retire and be dead in 6 months. So keep active to some extent. If it's summer time, find a nice helpful high schooler that needs a part time job and let them run up and down the stairs.

Farmers have had the same streak. Work hard for 50+ years, sit on the sofa/front porch for a few months and help the social security/pension fund stay solvent by no longer drawing on it. :eek: It seems like "semi-retirement" to less physically demanding activities is the better option.

[Mitchell Garnett]

they had tried to do more than their aging bodies were capable of doing.

I'm guilty as charged. I had rotator cuff surgery last spring on my left shoulder because of this and I will be having my right shoulder done in the autumn (if it holds together through the summer that is). I'm putting off the second surgery so I can enjoy a summer and some two-handed woodworking before I enter another 4 to 6 months of having to limit what I do with my right arm.

[Kent A Bathurst]

+1,000.

The suggestions to bring a bunch of inexperienced kids onto this complex, difficult and potentially very hazardous job ...

No doubt. Just for the record, my "suggestion" about the high school guys was not as builders, it was as "gophers" to climb the grade for forgotten tools, muscle another set of wood down to the always-moving worksite, the back-breaking-hard-labor stuff like that.

Kinda similar to my younger days when my "grew-up-farming-in-Kansas-in-the-30s" Dad would say "teenage sons are machines designed to convert food and shelter into mowed lawns, raked leaves, shoveled driveways, and whatever else I can think of". Whatta card, eh? :D :D

[Mike Cruz]

Larry, dropping the tool and having it go to the bottom is not that big of a deal. Dropping YOU and falling to the bottom IS. Good call to pass. Some things just aren't worth it...

[Frank Drew]

Kinda similar to my younger days when my "grew-up-farming-in-Kansas-in-the-30s" Dad would say "teenage sons are machines designed to convert food and shelter into mowed lawns, raked leaves, shoveled driveways, and whatever else I can think of". Whatta card, eh? :D :D

Kent,

One of the nurses I work with grew up in rural Ohio and her dad was always telling his kids to go out in the yard and pick up sticks and twigs; well, they lived on the edge of a state forest and their yard was forever full of fallen and blown in sticks and twigs.

[Karl Card]

A man has to know his limitations, it appears that you know yours, that is a good thing...

[Larry Edgerton]

I was gone for the weekend, wow! A lot of responses.

I will never stop working. I like to work. And.... I have two ex wives, so its not really an option anyway.

This would have been a tough job in my twentys, and at 55, especially with that lets just call it an "active lifestyle"the body is not as good as someone that worked in an office and mowed the lawn on weekends. I've broken or fractured 63 bones, so I do not dare stop, but at the same time I have to preserve what I have left. This job would not help me preserve what I have left. Ironically I just finished three stair jobs in a row, so the timing was perfect. If I had not just done three stairs and had not been feeling the associated pain, I may have accepted it.

As far as approaching it as a paper contractor, I have no respect for that kind of thing. Even when I had multiple crews running I put my belt on every day at whichever site I was needed at, and quality control was better because of it. You can't BS a boss that is right next to you. I had good guys, four of them were licenced, but in the end it is my name on my work, and it will be right. Maybe a bit of a control freak, but after 30 years I have no customers that I am not on friendly terms with.

Funny thing though, I make almost as much working by myself. I paid all my top guys $25 hr, so I made no money on them, and the helper/apprentice types end up costing about the same. It seemed like the more I grossed, the slimmer the margins became. And then I got stuck. Stuck for an amount that made all of my gains for the past few years disappear, so I laid everyone off, and have made things simple. I work alone. If I need help I hire other small contractors that are out of work, and they are not too hard to find here in Michigan. Having employees was one of the biggest pains, and at this point, I just don't feel like dealing with it. Too much government intervention in my business. Working alone, none of that applys.

Larry

[Kent A Bathurst]

Kent,

One of the nurses I work with grew up in rural Ohio and her dad was always telling his kids to go out in the yard and pick up sticks and twigs; well, they lived on the edge of a state forest and their yard was forever full of fallen and blown in sticks and twigs.

Sounds familiar. At breakfast one morning in early summer in the latter 60s, Dad says: "Great news - you and I are going to put a new roof on the house, and I'm going to pay you 20 cents/hour." Me: "I dunno - I have a lot of stuff to do this summer." Dad: "The only part of that, that I'm not yet sure about, is if I'm going to pay you anything. Let's try again: We're going to put a new roof on the house and I'm going to pay you 20 cents/hour." Me: "Wow - great - when can we get started?" :p

[Steve Griffin]

Thanks for checking in Larry. Obviously you were getting all sort of advice from everyone who doesn't know you or the details of the situation.

I'm surprised you have "no respect for paper contractors".

My dream is to get my business to the point where I can be a "paper contractor". The brains of a job--the client relationships, the planning, the design time, the management of people and capital are things I enjoy more than pushing boards through the planer. I could then spend my free time hobby woodworking for our house and my family.

As a side note, by far the worst contractors I work with are the "hands on types". Managing a project is a full time job, and if they are up in the rafters they tend to drop balls left and right in terms of customers and planning.

Just some random thoughts,

Good luck and hope you find more work you enjoy! -Steve

[David Helm]

I agree with Larry. At least in this area, paper contractors don't have a clue about the building process. Getting a contractor's license in Washington has nothing to do with knowing anything about building. In my thirty years of building, I was always hands on; stayed small on purpose; and never built anything I wasn't proud of. As a home inspector, I see the results of paper contractors often: many things just plain missed or not done. Give me the guy who knows what he's doing every time.

[Ben Hatcher]

Ole puts the fun in funicular.

[Frank Drew]

Sounds familiar. At breakfast one morning in early summer in the latter 60s, Dad says: "Great news - you and I are going to put a new roof on the house, and I'm going to pay you 20 cents/hour." Me: "I dunno - I have a lot of stuff to do this summer." Dad: "The only part of that, that I'm not yet sure about, is if I'm going to pay you anything. Let's try again: We're going to put a new roof on the house and I'm going to pay you 20 cents/hour." Me: "Wow - great - when can we get started?" :p

Now, THAT'S Old Skool! :D

[Ole Anderson]

Ole puts the fun in funicular.

I knew there was another name for what I called an incline, but that word wasn't exactly on the tip of my tongue. Thanks for the reminder.

But seriously, if it were me, I would go back to the owner with a ballpark price on the teak version (but not by me) and the "funicular" version, try to sell them on that and if they bite, let them contract directly for the incline, and put together a spectacular deck or two. I agree, at 172 vertical feet, steps will seldom get used, but the incline would be another matter and would add a lot of value to the home.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Yearly upkeep on all that Teak would be staggering - both in cost and in time.

Wise move passing on it.