Building stairs when the landing is not even

We had a lower level cement slab patio poured that is slightly angled away from the house. Now we are building a second story deck and the stairs will land on the cement patio. The stairs are 48" wide and there is a change in angle/slope of about 3/4's of an inch in that 48". How do we compensate and keep the stair level?

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Apr 08, 2010
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Fixing an uneven Stair Landing
by: Editor - Rich Bergman

First let me assume that when you look at the stairs from a front view, that is the stairs are coming down towards you, the patio landing slopes from left to right or right to left. That is my assumption.

If that is the case there are a couple solutions to make your stairs level.

Firstly if you are a confident carpenter you could trace out your stair stringers as normal but before you cut them to length add 3/4" to the bottom side of the stringer that needs to be longer.

This does require a bit of thinking and visualization in your mind and some folks are not comfortable and get confused doing this. But it will work

Secondly, you could take a couple stainless or hot dip galvanized lag bolts - say 3/8"x3" and drill holes into the bottom surface of the stringer 2.5-3" deep. Then screw in the lags leaving about 3/4" exposed.

Install the stairs and see how level it is. The nice thing is that with the hex head lag screws you can take a wrench and turn each lag as much as you need to in order to fine tune the height to get it perfectly level.

Stainless steel is probably the best for this situation. Should be very firm and perfect.

Those are my thoughts. Maybe some other builders have some better ideas and solutions. Please help out.

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