Sloping Stair Treads

In the illustration above I simply raised the rear of the stair tread, to give you a better idea of what we will be doing.  However, we will not be raising the rear of the stair tread, even though it can be laid out either way. 

You can raise the back of the stair tread while laying out the stair stringer or lower the front of the stair tread, the final choice will be up to you. 

As long as you obtained the final objective without creating any safety problems or riser height measurement variations then you can layout your stair stringer, however you want. 

In the illustration above I placed a level on top of the rear section of the stair tread to provide you another view, of what we're trying to accomplish.   

For all of you who think I have put too many illustrations in this book, I apologize and for all of you who don't have enough, I want you to know that I did my best.   

Plywood Ledgers 

Even though I've never installed a plywood ledger, because I'm not entirely convinced it's the best way to go, others have and that's why I'm going to address it, in this chapter. 

In the next chapter you will find a better way to attach stair stringers to a deck, landing or floor, but I'm really not going to knock this method to much, because it works.

How To Line Stringer Up With Floor Joist 

In order to figure out the exact position of the stair headout or double joist located in the floor framing, you will need to layout the stringer. 

In the illustration above you can see the top step or upper step and the top of floor, along with the last two risers.  The first step will be to extend the last tread layout mark that will represent the top of floor as shown in illustration above. 

In the next step we're going to line the end of the framing square up with the measurement on the framing square that represents the width or vertical height of the floor joist. 

In our example we're using 2 x 6 joist that are 5 1/2 inches wide.