Ask the Architect

All I get are wood stairs?

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Q. My neighbor and I are both raising our houses, but he claims the state gave him the money to rebuild his brick stairs, while I got money only for wood stairs and small platform to walk out to. My stairs look terrible compared with his brick ones, and I want to know why he got more money and brick stairs, while I have to accept wood ones. They aren’t going to last.

A. Simple answer: Your neighbor either doesn’t know that the state of New York, using federal Housing and Urban Development money, didn’t grant money for masonry stairs, or he just plain lied. HUD standards, as was explained to different clients while I was with them, will not cover something considered a luxury item. If you did build a masonry stair, and look at what the description covers in the spreadsheet they gave back to every homeowner, you’d see that the wood landing and stairs, a small $1,250 allowance (not nearly enough) is what each household was granted for each exterior stair. So either your neighbor never looked at the grant award breakdown or likes telling what I like to call a “cocktail party” story.

I tried to argue for my clients that wood stairs are a terrible short-term choice. The HUD standard is a 5-foot-square landing at the door with 3-foot-wide stairs going to the ground. The material is to be treated wood — pine — which not only won’t last without a lot of maintenance, but also has a substance finish that isn’t uniformly treated and will rot and become rickety and dangerous. Common sense tells you that there’s no way these stairs are going to last, and any substitution, whether it’s maintenance-free synthetic lumber or masonry, is the homeowner’s out-of-pocket additional expense. A simple call to the New York Rising call center, at (516) 830-4949, can confirm this.

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