The Stairway to…Where?

Another exciting week at the Kenwood house! As you saw last week, the concrete set beautifully. The plumbing inspector gave us final approval (thanks to my investor) and we're back on a moving freight train. Wesley and Sebastien are back in the house (yeah!) and we have fresh lumber ready for the basement stairs. The basement stairs have been the biggest challenge of this entire project - even before we purchased the property, everything hinged on whether or not we could move those stairs to make a larger, more functional kitchen. Then the question became "Where do we put the basement stairs?". We have entertained at least 5 different scenarios. Finally, after several standing meetings with arms folded while staring down at invisible ideas in the floor, our architect came up with a concrete (pun intended) solution:

It looked great! Then, I walk into the house bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Monday morning to witness this:

*silence*

*cough*

*silence*

*shoe scuffing noise*

Remember when we dug out the basement to gain more ceiling space? Yeah well, here's the problem. The drawings have 11 stairs from the 1st floor to the basement floor. Each stair has to have specific dimensions to meet code requirements. Since we have a deeper basement, we now need 13 stairs. We have the height for 13 stairs (of course), we do not have the width because of that beautiful I-Beam that we installed with manpower (remember?).

<=====memories

So, what are our options?

Option 1: Put the stairs from the (new) mudroom along the south side of the basement, good-bye dining room floor.

Option 2: Put the stairs where the entrance from the dining room into the kitchen is located and take out the pocket door *heart palpitations*

Option 3: Lose the pantry.

So, instead of a curved step into the mudroom hallway - we now have stairs directly from the kitchen. We also have a new order for a pantry cabinet (approx. $2,300):

<==actual revision drawing sent to cabinet maker

...and, after all was said and done - it turned out just fine:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Now, onto the 2nd to 3rd floor stairs...