Deferred Maintenance Timebomb: Slumlord Stairways

One of the properties I purchased in 2007 suffers from "repairs" made by a notorious slumlord in Ogden who flipped the property to the person I purchased it from.  You might remember this post from last year: Photo of the Day: Math for Dummies.

That ill-resolved math problem was enscribed on the stairs I had the priveledge or rebuilding this week.  There are two sets that need to be rebuilt.  Here are photos of the stairs I have not demolished yet.  They are representative of the condition of the stairs I removed with my bare hands:

Look at the top landing area and how they placed the 2X4's horizontally when framing it.  Then notice how they screwed it into the 1/2 inch OSB board.  They didn't screw into studs...just the OSB.  Nice!

My kids could do better work than this.  These stairs were in "good" condition when we purchased the property several years ago.  The passage of time, poor craftsmanship, and lousy materials bring us this travesty just a few short years later.  Clearly, the slumlord who did this work intended to do it cheaply with an eye toward bamboozling the person he sold it too. 

To begin to remedy this problem, I took a couple days off during the last two weeks to construct new stairs.  Here are the results:

I will be siding the OSB with cedar shakes to give it a cool old time look.  I will post photos when I am finished. 

I used treated pine and framing nails as my buidling materials.  The hardest part of this whole project was drilling holes in the concrete for the anchor screws.  My hammer drill and carbide bit took about an hour per hole just to drill 2 inches into the 102 year old concrete.  I might as well have been drilling granite. Anway, I am encouraged that these stairs should last at least another 40 years.  .