How to build stairs {camping lake project}

We celebrated Father’s Day this weekend at the lake as well as a delicious dinner at a local restaurant. My parents opened the pool (yes we are a little late this summer) and did work around the yard on Sunday so we celebrated with my dad on Saturday night. Last week I shared our deck renovation progress at the campsite and today, I am sharing how to build stairs. Our camper is adjacent to an existing deck that needs a little TLC so building a set of stairs was first on the list of things to do.

The site had two existing decks, the one over the lake and this deck where the camper sits.

The existing deck is fairly stable with the exception of a few rotted pieces. We plan on re-bracing the underneath and re-decking a portion of the floor. First though, stairs are necessary!

Our camper came equipped with metal stairs but because of the distance between the existing deck, they were not conducive to entering and existing safely. The gap was fairly large. The wooden stairs will look much nicer as well.

We used 2×6, 2×4, 4×4 and 2×10 pressure treated wood to build our stairs. Be sure to use nails and screws that are meant for outdoors. We measured how wide we wanted our stairs to be and then cut the 2×6 pieces of wood to length and nailed together forming a box.

I had no idea that steps are essentially “boxes” placed on top of each other. I guess I never really thought about the process before.

We then created “legs” out of 4×4’s pressure treated wood. We decided to add a wooden brace (2×10’s cut to size) on the bottom of the legs because the ground was somewhat uneven and the wood allows for stability. We fastened with 3″ nails and viola, cute little legs. You can also dig holes and use sauna tubes or a variety of different ways to stabilize your legs but for this project, we took the simple route and braced with wood.

We placed our “box” where we wanted it on the deck and my job was to stand on it, to keep it in place. See my legs? 😉 I thought my dad was kidding when he said, “stand on it.” Needless to say, I had to stand on it for about 30 minutes while he fastened it to the existing deck.

Still standing and able to take a selfie! My dad was annoyed with all the pictures. He said we would have finished an hour earlier if I didn’t keep taking pictures ;). ha

We added the legs to the inside of the box and nailed together. You can also see that we added a wooden brace in the middle of the box to reinforce stability.

See below that we also used cut to size “cleats” on the inside of the box to fasten to the existing deck. This allows you to nail the box to the existing deck as well as reinforce with screws.

We used 1×6 pressure treated decking wood to create the floor. You will need to use a jig saw to cut out the portion near the leg. We left a 1″ overhang around the edge as well.

Continue to add your flooring and nail on the edges and on the center brace.

Looking pretty good right? Repeat the same steps to build your second stair. Once we measured how large we wanted our second stair, we created another box and assembled to the legs. See below, we also added cleats on the inside to fasted the box to the first stair. You can see, we made our second box smaller in order to create a 1/2 inch inset from the bottom.

Add your floor and you are done!

Love them!

We still need to stain the deck and stairs as well as add another foot of decking to the existing deck but slowly but surely, our summer lake project is coming along! It took us about 2 hours to build the stairs and now we need to build a smaller set for the back entrance door. How to build stairs is much easier than I thought it would be ;).

UPDATE: Click here to see amazing full deck reveal {before and after}