concrete stairs

1houseplease

debating concrete or wooden stairs for a new build.
want a curve and not too hung up on any particular finish.

can concrete stairs be plastered? to allow sides and rises to be painted? then do steps only in wood/tile.

so many variables but how much would a average quality curved stairs be?
have a price of 3500 for concrete one to be made on site- im aware finishing costs dont end there.

anyone have experience in getting metal railings done

B-D-P--

Been looking into this myself.

The main cost according to my research is in the finishing of a concrete stairs.

Would quote that up before you do make final decision.

con1982

If you go for a hi-spec concrete finish, you won't need to plaster it. Does the quote of 3,5k include for a curve?

Timber is more homely.

I guess it depends on the overall look you want.

mfceiling

Concrete stairs are a good job but they need to be done right. The curve and steps need to be "bang on" to get it to work. They can be plastered but then how to you finish that? Paint, carpet, timber on the threads?
Is your floor downstairs strong enough to take the weight of the stairs?

Plenty to think about.

madmac187

1houseplease wrote: »

debating concrete or wooden stairs for a new build.
want a curve and not too hung up on any particular finish.

can concrete stairs be plastered? to allow sides and rises to be painted? then do steps only in wood/tile.

so many variables but how much would a average quality curved stairs be?
have a price of 3500 for concrete one to be made on site- im aware finishing costs dont end there.

anyone have experience in getting metal railings done

Have looked into this also, not for curve just standard stairs, but one thing you have to look into and everyone forgets this but need to meat up your foundation and it's very expensive timber cladding stairs

Tom Hagen

might be bit more expensive alright but no creaks for the rest of your life. and god help if theres ever a fire at least you know there's full access to the upstairs with a concrete staircase. but the no creaking would appeal to me. can still be timbered off with cladding to make it homely - no difference in the look

1houseplease

Yep quote was including curve as it was shuttering done on site.

Would paint the plaster and just clad steps only in either tile or wood.

New build so for will bed planned to take the load and upstairs is slabs.

Then would have to decide on either wood or metal railings

Any recommendations on company doing wooden curved stairs that aren't high end?

murphaph

A concrete stairs needs a bit more planning than timber because it is sunken into the screed and has to sit directly on the subfloor, at least ours does. The thing weighs a couple of tonnes.

You have to carefully plan the thing to take account of finished floor levels so your risers are even in height when the treads are clad. You don't want the last step to be different (even by a cm or so) as you will misjudge the step all the time.

We have both a concrete stairs (ground floor to basement) and timber (ground to first). I still have to clad our concrete stairs (going to tile it). We used the same joiner for the timber stairs to provide the handrail for the concrete stairs so it all flows fairly seamlessly.

RexBanner

We put in a straight concrete stairs in our new build, the main reason was to avoid having creaks down the road, but we didn't put too much thought into it beyond that. Now that we're fully moved-in I'm very happy with the decision, but there are a few things that I've learned:

Finished floor level - As Murphaph mentioned, you need to make sure that the stairs is planned carefully to factor in the ffl's, our builder make a mistake when ordering the stairs and as a result the bottom riser was smaller than all the others, it was only 40mm or so but our engineer wanted it spot-on. Luckily we were installing oak-threads, so were able to lose the 40mm difference over the entire run of the stairs by raising each thread slightly.

Damage to stairs - With our stairs it went in the same day as the pre-cast slabs for the first-floor so was exposed for almost the entire build. As a result it suffered some damage, a few chunks knocked out of the front of the threads and some of the edges damaged. These wouldn't have been a problem if we were fully cladding the stairs but we wanted to paint the majority of the stairs so these needed to be made-good before we could paint.

Finish of stairs - We hadn't given much thought to the finish of the stairs initially, but in the end we settled on a metal banister with oak threads, and the risers/sides/back painted. All these finishes cost about 3k, but I did the painting piece myself. Before painting I had to grind/chisel-off any excess concrete, then multiple iterations of filling and sanding (there were a lot of (i assume) air-pockets in the concrete, which resulted in cavities that had to be filled) and then multiple iterations of painting and sanding.

Overall I'm very happy with the finish, bar the few imperfections in the finish that only I can see. The concrete stairs feels much more solid and modern which is what we were aiming for...

893bet

Rex,

Any chance of a picture?