You can now see our internal stair case. This has caused us much of our humming and haaing. We've thought often of removing the spiral stairs, which are very narrow, but because of room available, the location of the exit upstairs, etc, we're currently thinking that we'll be better to stick with these. We could put in a more conventional staircase, but that would require far more significant structural changes, particularly upstairs. If we do keep the spiral, we'll open up the final curve so that it runs straight along the wall where the fish tank currently is, making the stairs more accessible and allowing us to actually use the stairs and the dining room at the same time.

We have a couple of requirements for the stairway which add some further complications. In order to retain on-sell value and functionality for ourselves, we want to retain the ability to open or close off upstairs to make it self-contained, and we want it to be relatively easy and quick to do. This means having a false floor available to close off the stairs, making treatment of banisters and stair railings upstairs rather tricky. Currently the top of the stairs is boxed in (as you'll see later), but I'm not sure yet how we'll treat that. As for making the unused stairs not stand out like a sore thumb, we'll have to work on that too. Then there's also the issue of maximising space under the stairs for storage etc… So many questions.

So you can see that this room is probably the most fiddly to work with. Thankfully the final rooms downstairs should be a pretty basic (besides of course totally replacing the kitchen : )    (Home)