 All right guys welcome back free tip Friday and today we're building well we're building exactly what the title of this video says stairs without stringers have I done this before no I have no idea what I'm doing I'm just making this up as I go along I was laying in bed a couple weeks back couldn't fall asleep because my brains is going like crazy every night and it just came to me like a vision and I was like dude I could build awesome set of stairs without stringers because really outside stairs just don't I don't know they just don't get me excited you know just the stringers and the treads and the buttons and you know you can dress them up a little bit to look pretty but ultimately I just yeah not a big fan of just boring old cut stringer stairs got to add a little penache so this is what I came up with and it's so far it seems super super sturdy we don't have it installed yet I'm gonna do a quick kind of temporary installation because I haven't poured a landing from my bottom of my stairs yet but we'll just block it up and give it a test jump on it a few times to see how solid it is it seems rock solid right now so here's what we're doing watch and learn we've got these boxes set up with a I wanted a 16 inch stair tread so I just marked my 16 inches where I want the overlap then we've cut these notches plum with each other and then I grabbed some ready rod hot dip galvanized ready rod I got a bunch of two-inch flap bar that I cut into three-inch pieces drilled holes through it to back to this like a giant washer that'll span these two pieces right here which sandwich the ready rod together so we drop in the ready rod underneath line it up on top sandwich it with a flap bar washer lock washer and then a nut so this one is short obviously because we're mounting that to the deck so we want the tread space obviously coming off the deck to be even all the way down to that's why this box is short but that's pretty much how it goes just like that we got a solid set of stairs now for extra strength just to prevent any kind of rocking I'm gonna drill alongside my screws I've got end screws going into these little joists here I'm gonna pre-drill alongside that kind of an a bit of an angled so I hit the top of that next joist then I'm gonna drop in these 12-inch GRKs to lock the center part of the rim joist into the next step and I should just make this thing super solid so I'll do that on both of these steps all three steps and then let's install it we've got our staircase in place now another nice feature about putting these three quarter inch spacer blocks in between your framing and your fascia board as it gives you a three quarter inch space to mount your stairs to a nice piece of plush retreated blue bit pleasure pleasure pleasure treated pressure treated plywood so I'm just gonna screw this in on my line right here so I'm gonna have to dig this bottom area out here I'm gonna pour a little bit of a footing I'm actually gonna put a couple more rocks right there on either corner scribe the stairs onto the rocks and then I'll bring like some flagstone kind of pathway up to the stairs once we have them all leveled out but feel solid maybe somebody will have to get a hold of the T.S. 1 Dell see if he can check my engineering on the stairs but that seems like a rock solid to me and it looks really cool to just see the stairs floating like that no stringers well there you have it guys the stairs are officially installed everything is rock solid but poor little concrete footer here for the stairs to land on I've got some plastic wood at some scrap trecks decking leftover so I cut a few plastic shims to hold the framing up off the concrete about half an inch that'll keep the bottom of my stair my stringer list stairs come on 1 800 number yeah no so you can see these stairs look kind of trippy they look like they're just floating in mid air which I really think that's kind of a cool look obviously building your stairs this way if you're getting your stairs inspected by a building inspector they're not gonna pass even though they could very well be strong enough you'd have to get an engineer to do the math and make sure that this is gonna be strong enough and get an engineer to sign off on it if you want to build a set of stairs like this but I'm just doing whatever I want over here at my house so don't think you can build a set of stairs just like this if you're getting your stuff inspected because it's likely gonna cause you a whole lot of headaches I like to always have about an eighth of slope on my stairs so that water drains off the treads I don't want water puddling or sitting on top of my wood treads so always slope your stairs down a hair so that the water just drains off the front of the nosing so there's a cool idea for somebody who may be farting around their house wanting to put in a unique set of stairs on the deck or exterior of their house your bonus tip for this week check this out I'm putting a trim board around this because it always looks way better birds are already shitting on my deck can't believe this so there's gonna be a two by six with a miter 45 right here so it frames out the deck nice so you don't see any of the end grain but underneath could have left these boards square and they would have just sat right down on the edge of this beam but then you have that gap in there between the root the trim board and these butt ends and what will happen is leaves and dirt and stuff will get in there and it'll just get stuck and start to decompose and essentially just turn into soil and dirt which will then invite all sorts of little critters to start growing and rotting out the ends of your wood so what I've done here is I beveled these back using my track saw or you could just do a circular saw with a you know a piece of plywood for a fence if you don't have a track saw and I just beveled these back so any water that goes down in there or dirt will get washed out down in between the little gap right here now I might cut this a little bit wider so it's more of three eight cinch gap that way I know that water is gonna flush anything that gets down in that crack it's gonna flush it out and down and it'll drain out the bottom of the deck so this should increase the longevity of your deck boards I've just left this cedar raw because it's old growth red cedar it's gonna last forever whether you stain it or not the stain is ultimately just a aesthetic thing this stuff will last for 50 60 years before it starts to rot out in any way and especially if I keep it clean and that way also when you're power washing your deck it'll be sure to blast anything out of there it doesn't leave any wood trapped and getting underneath or dirt trapped getting underneath the boards and just sitting there when I power wash and hit that joint it's just gonna blast all the dirt out through that crack and keep the deck clean and when your deck is clean the algae and the little micro organisms can't grow which is what rots out your wood so you want to keep your deck clean free of dirt and organic material like leaves decomposing all that sort of stuff and your deck should last for a long long time just a little bit of maintenance so that's your tip also keeps a lot of air in there having a gap in behind there allows the air to get in there dry out the wood quicker and the less time your wood spent saturated and wet the less likely it is to rot as well so it's just you know it's just we're just winning so much winning and for those of you who didn't catch it in the time lapse this is your bonus bonus tip is when you're laying your decking the fastest the easiest way to do it is just to leave all your boards wild run them extra long let them hang over the edge of the deck and then when you're done because a lot of guys will put their trim board on and they'll butt the boards up but man if your end cuts aren't exactly perfectly square or your deck is a tiny bit out of square your square cuts will all look funky and you won't have that nice perfect clean line so it's way easier to just run them all wild screw everything down super quick then just snap a line put a fan so use a track saw on your circular saw just run down cut all the boards perfectly in line with the edge of your deck so that you reveal on your trim board is you know nice and even you get a nice hangover on your nosing past the fascia and that joint will just look like C and C beautiful okay so save yourself some time don't bother cutting all your boards to length first or trying to get everything perfect eliminate that human air nightmare which I've done so many times and just snap a line cut them out after it'll be perfect you just wait and see yeah I'm done talking now so leave me a comment please leave me a like if you're not subscribed well you're just you're just a hateful person no that's that's a little bit harsh you're just doing yourself more harm than anybody else so hit the subscribe button okay until next time samurai out