The Staircase Held Up by 3 Nails — And How We Fixed It
A client living overseas bought a summer property near Wasaga Beach, Ontario, and asked us to look at a staircase that, frankly, shouldn’t have been walked on. When we pulled it apart, we found the entire structure was being carried by three 2½-inch nails — driven through the weakest point of the stair stringers, right where straight-grain wood is most prone to snapping under load.
The correct method builds out a base from the beam so the stringers are properly capped and securely fastened to the deck structure, with the cap extending past the lowest point of the stringer for real support. This staircase had none of that — top and bottom were both relying on the fragile tip of the stringer, the exact spot most likely to shear off.
To make it worse, the base of the staircase sat on an unfooted platform on sand — directly on top of the property’s septic field, which is illegal; nothing is permitted to be built within 5 feet of a septic field. We ended up relocating the entire staircase to solve both problems at once.
The rebuild moved the new staircase safely away from the septic system, and we added a mid-flight landing and storage space beneath the stairs — both practical additions and a safety measure, since a landing shortens how far anyone could fall if they missed a step. We also paired the joists and added a solid red-cedar laminated brow — not the kerf-cut, short-lived version sometimes seen on renovation shows, but an epoxy lamination built to last roughly 30 years — which created enough extra space for a full dining table on the upper level. A boardwalk was added out to the water, and a long list of deficiencies from the original inspection got resolved in the same project.
The lesson worth remembering: structural failures like this one are often invisible until you look underneath. If a staircase has an unusual bounce or flex, or if its base placement seems close to a septic field or utility line, it’s worth a proper inspection before it’s worth a second trip up.