Amateur carpenters who have laid out the cuts in a stair stringer (the zig-zag structural support for the steps) know the queasy feeling that bubbles up at the prospect of this job. There’s the simple ...

To lay out a set of stair stringers from scratch requires a little math, but not much. Equally important is some quiet time to run the numbers and at the same time to think about the construction ...

"You can absolutely cut a stair stringer if only you only knew the way the math works," my dad once said to me. So, long before I ever had a geometry class, I knew the math behind determining a slope.

You probably give little thought to the stairs you go up or down to reach different levels of your home, deck or patio. I’ll wager that if I handed you a measuring tape, a framing square, a pencil and ...