You Don't Botch Your Notches with Pre-Cut Stair Stringers
The 1895 farm house we owned in Illinois had porches galore: most houses don't have that many doors, let alone exterior doors. More than a century of benign (and occasionally malignant) neglect took its toll on those porches, though, just in time for yours truly to be called on to repair them. The porch we used most - the one at the kitchen door - was in such bad condition it looked like a lawsuit in waiting, so our second year in the house I tackled it head-on. It wasn't the toughest project of the summer, but it also wasn't the easiest. The ledger by which the porch attached to the house remained sound, but that was it. Everything else was toast: frame, deck, railings and stairs. And when I peeled off the old stair treads, I found those gorgeous old cedar stringers were in no condition to be re-used. Oh, dear...