Front Stairway

Like many projects, the front steps started as a conspiracy between an idea, ample enthusiasm, and a general lack of common sense to hold one back.  How nice it would be, we thought, to have fancy-ish paved steps leading up the sloped lawn to our front door. Not only would this add some appeal to our dreadfully uninteresting forescape, but it would keep those who supply of our neverending cavalcade of Amazon boxes--those that make it all the way to the front door at least--from hopping over the flower beds as they take a shortcut through the lawn and kicking rubber bark onto the sidewalk on their way out. Of course there were doubts,... sometimes from me but mostly from other people.  That didn't stop the progress, but this was our biggest home project to date.  It took a very long time indeed, as interference from life and other inconveniences separated the intermittent pockets of project-ing across roughly 18 months of time.

As a first step, I drove some stakes into the ground where I figured steps should go and ran string to help visualize it. I shoveled out the sod inbetween the lines with a pickaxe and shovel.  Too late to turn back now.

I continued to chop and dig out the rough steps by hand, loading the clods of clay-filled soil into wheelbarrows and dumping them in the backyard, where I disposed of them later.  In this photo, I had dug out enough to start to visualize the steps up the roughly 40-inch rise, but I went deeper later to make room for a base rock layer. This actually turned out to be one of the most labor intensive and dangerous tasks of the job.  The labor was carting off four truck-fulls of wet, heavy, soil to the landscape dump for recycling.  The danger was driving my Duran-Duran era truck to get there.

Once enough soil was removed, I made a lumber frame for the steps, and added rock and wire reinforcement. Since I was doing this myself, a little flair was in order, so some bent bits were added to give each step a gentle curve, and cables were threaded though the forms for low-voltage lighting.

Concrete really is the ideal outdoor building material.  It's strong, durable, versatile, and costs next to nothing if you have the tools. Like anyone else who needs to pour concrete, I borrowed my parent's cement mixer.  This same mixer makes cameos in memories of my own childhood, so I felt lucky to pass on the experience to my own little monkeys.  It also felt nice to have the help, especially when the help came in the form of mocking and general silliness.

Once the concrete was poured into the forms and cured (in three separate stages)...

I was able to pull of the forms and get a good approximation of step-like objects. At this point, however, I hadn't really figured out what to do to keep the sides from caving once the inevitable rain started to come down.  I knew I needed to reinforce it, but I wasn't sure what to use and considered many materials.

In the end, more concrete, wire mesh, and some rebar won out, so I added some forms and mixed up another batch. Non-incidentally, reports of a length of rebar going through a sprinkler line around this time (necessitating some painful digging out and reconstructions) are, of course, fake news.

With the forms off, the steps really started looking legit. But bare concrete is kind of ugly, so the idea was to skin it with pavers and their ilk.

To minimize waste, I had sized the width of steps to match the repeating pattern in some large irregular-shaped pavers.  The front and back curves of each step also matched, so I could layout the pavers in a large slab and cut it like a jigsaw puzzle into separate adjoining pieces with no waste. For this, I found a Harbor Freight brick saw invaluable cheap solution... as was my helper.

I laid out the pavers onto the steps, over sand and rock for the flat bits, and with thinset onto the steps themselves.

For the front edges of each step, charcoal bullnose pavers gave a nice contrast.  Each paver was cut down to size and fanned out, with colored mortar lovingly shoved in-between the cracks. The cutoffs from each bullnose provided the front face of each step, and also housed a pair of LED lights for each step using the wiring embedded into the concrete beforehand. I used polymeric sand to lock the pavers, and then sprayed on a medium gloss sealer.

To finish off the steps and cover up the remaining raw concrete, dark stacked stone was added to the sidewall faces and wall cap pavers mortared on top. I completed these last steps relatively recently after many months off.  In the meantime, other projects intervened, including pillars and fencing across the entire front yard.  The front gate is visible here, as is a part of the stair landing that extends to the side for access to a mailbox embedded in one of the pillars.

And here is the result, with the steps completed. Projects still to be done include extending the pavers over the swalkway area above and perhaps the driveway, but that is for another day.