Rounded Deck Stairs

I saw these photos on my news feed on Facebook last week.  They showed up there since the person unknown to me tagged a friend of mine.  I suppose that they had been in a previous conversation about them and the person posting the photos was trying to show them as an example.  Just speculating.

I really like the rounded steps and it has me reconsidering my planned deck design.  As you can see in my mock-up below, I was planning on having a set of long deck stairs, but with two 45 degree angles in them to get them to wrap around and make the corner.  I think what I'll do different is replace these stairs with one set of rounded ones instead.  I won't quite get the same deck area from doing this since I'll only be able to bend these out so far.  But I think that it will be a nice custom touch that will help add a little calm to the deck design.  It will also tie in to the rounded brick patio area.

Another thing I realize that needs changing about my design is that the height is not at all to scale.  This design comes from a 3D version of my house that I built using Google Sketchup.  I began this project for the sole purpose of seeing what the house would look like in different color schemes.  My intention was to just build the house pretty basic and only focus on the front and one side so that I could show my wife as many different color schemes as her heart desired from the one angle.  However, one thing led to another and before I knew it, I was searching the web for 3D versions of some of the most needless detailed additions to my model.

The benefit is that I can use it for things like this to help me design the perfect deck.  Concerning the unscaled height I mentioned earlier, there's no real way to fix it on Sketchup without completely redoing everything from the foundation up.  What happened was that I just guessed at the height of the foundation when I started the project.  In reality, my house sits about 18" taller than what this design shows.  In turn, my deck only shows three steps coming down into the yard, but it'll be more like five or six.

To remedy this partly, I may add a couple steps from the back door to the deck.  This will lower the entire deck height and allow me to only have three or four steps from the deck to the yard.  If I do this, I can also make those steps rounded and help tie in the deck design to the house a bit.

I don't yet know when we will start this project but I'm certain that, with at least 4 years of planning already under our belts, we'll have all the bugs worked out when we do.

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