Photo: Adam Jan Figel (Shutterstock)
When my wife and I bought our house a few years ago, we were delighted by its century-old charm. Then I fell down the stairs—more than once. Upon sober inspection, it turned out our vintage stairs, designed and built in an era before concepts like “building codes” were a thing, were at an unusually steep incline, and featured shorter treads at that. I have since acquired the skill of taking the Death Stairs without mishap, and started giving every visitor to our home a quick safety lesson before sending them up to the guest room.
So why haven’t we just torn out the stairs and replaced them? Because it’s impossible.
Well, not impossible. Altering the stairs would merely require a massive renovation of the entire house. If you’ve bought (or are thinking of buying) an older home with a plan to modernize, your old stairs might turn out to be a bigger headache than you imagined too. Here’s what you need to know about living with those old, “grandfathered” stairs.
The time before building codes
If your house was built before the 1950s, your stairs were probably built by a carpenter who basically fit them into the available space. That doesn’t mean the stairs are unsafe, necessarily. It just means that they took measurements and crammed in the stairs however they could—even if that meant they had to be very steep in order to fit.
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When uniform building codes became more of a thing in the mid-20th century, a lot of these stairs were “grandfathered” in, meaning they are no longer code-compliant but don’t need to be replaced as long as they are left as-is. In other words, your original, noncompliant stairs are perfectly legal and no one’s going to force you to replace them—as long as you don’t do attempt to significantly alter them. You can generally make aesthetic changes to your stairs without issue, but if you decide to tear them out and replace them, they suddenly become subject to the current building codes in your area, and you must adhere to them.
This can be an issue, because most older stairs are quite steep when judged against modern building codes. Staircases are defined by rise (the measurement from bottom to top, which each vertical called a riser) and run (its horizontal length, with each step called a tread). The higher your rise, the shorter your run can be. Older stairs usually had risers of about nine inches with nine-inch treads, but these measurements varied depending on need—some older homes have stairs almost as steep as a ladder. Modern codes tend to require much lower rises, which makes the staircase much safer, but also much longer. New stairs also generally have to be at least 36 inches wide, whereas older stairs were frequently much narrower.
This different standards mean replacing an old staircase often requires a lot more room; if the stairs have to be wider and longer, it will be very difficult (or impossible) to fit them in the same space.
Living with your “grandfathered” stairs
So what can you do when your contractor informs you replacing your stairs will require moving two load-bearing walls and possibly buying your neighbor’s house in order to build an addition? You have two choices: You can increase the size of your renovation loan and ask an architect to figure out how to make your stairs code-compliant, or you can figure out how to live with them.
If you weren’t planning (or budgeting) for a massive renovation, give your existing stairs a makeover instead. Remember that your stairs are grandfathered in as long as you don’t alter the rise and run. In other words, it’s not the actual stairs that matter, but the existing measurements. You can replace just about every aspect of your existing stairs—treads, risers, railings—without triggering the need for a code-compliant replacement, as long as you retain their original specs and your “new” stairs fit the same physical space. As long as the rise of your stairs isn’t a dealbreaker, you can achieve a “like-new” look without violating your local building codes.
If your old stairs are solid, you can complete an aesthetic renovation by capping the treads and risers with something like Cap-a-Tread, or by installing carpet, giving your stairs an all-new look and feel without changing a single measurement that might affect their code compliance.
