How to Brighten a Dark Staircase

When I was very young my father taught me to go with my first answer. When a question was asked and an answer popped into my head, that answer was right, and unless I was certain it was wrong I should stick with it. Don't second guess myself.

When I was in college my English professor believed the soul of writing was editing. Anybody can scribble words on a page but the process of agonizing over word choices and punctuation decisions was where writing actually happened. That's where the scribbling becomes a masterpiece.

Sorry Dr. Brown, but I'm going with my father's advice. When I write the first word that comes to mind is the truth. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Editing is for wimps. I am what I feel and what I feel needs to be committed to the page while I feel it to truly reveal who I am. Going back and rewording what I wrote seems like lying.

Someone might say "That's fine for a journal but what about technical writing? Fiction writing? Business letters?"

I'd answer that truth is important in technical writing and fiction and in business because human beings are always the reading audience. The goal in communicating is to be understood.

Brian and I discussed communism and capitalism a few days ago. The age old questions of meritocracy verses collectivism and if the communist concept of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is better or worse than the capitalist "from each according to his desire, to each according to his effort."

We talked about the accidental social experiment of the Cold War, where the 42 nations of Europe sided to one degree or another with Soviet communism or American capitalism and how the most prosperous nations in Europe today aren't communist or capitalist, but a healthy socialist mix of both.

We even talked about how we play multi player computer games together. If the knight in the front of the battle hogs all of the loot drops and doesn't share them with the archer or the healer the knight benefits at the expense of his team mates, but if he shares all the loot with the team mates who need it most the team benefits at the knight's expense. Which is better?

Brian has a school writing assignment today to pick an issue and argue it, with sources and references and citations. Our recent discussion on communism, socialism, and capitalism immediately jumped to my mind and I excitedly asked if he was going to write about it.

"Nah, I'm writing about how homework is a waste of time and doesn't help us learn anything."

It's his assignment. Writing it is his truth, not mine. Still, it's hard to keep quiet while he airs a personal grievance instead of exploring an ideology and questioning the status quo. It feels like an opportunity lost to me. I need to realize that not ranting about homework in this writing assignment would feel like a missed opportunity to him.

Speak your truth, Kid. Hopefully you'll learn to edit better than I. Dr. Brown's truth was never mine but it could be yours.

* * *

I've been working on a project for the last couple weeks. It's almost finished and I've shared the pictures with a few people. Nearly everyone I've shared them with wants to know more, like how I did a certain part or what inspired the idea. It's easier to type on my laptop than text on my phone and I'm kind of tired of answering all these questions multiple times for multiple people so I decided to tell the whole story here. Some of you know parts of it already, please forgive the redundancy.

When we were house hunting in Roanoke our realtor Mike saw me struggling to get down the stairs in the house we ended up buying. He apologized to me and said he would only show us single story houses from now on.

I appreciated the concern but stairs aren't a deal breaker for me, I was just in a very dark stairwell in an unfamiliar home. If you think about it you could walk up and down the staircase in your own home with your eyes closed, with enough repetition it becomes muscle memory. I liked the home and a dark staircase wasn't enough to keep me from making an offer on it.

But once I moved in I realized I'd overestimated how comfortable I'd become on the staircase. I got familiar with it but it really was dark. Uncomfortably dark. So I decided to add a light fixture in the ceiling above the stairwell.

I bought a ceiling fixture and a motion detector switch from Amazon and started hunting around the attic for a source of power I could use. But I realized every wire in the attic was powering a light and they were all hooked up to toggle switches. If I tapped into any of them they'd only be hot if the light was switched on, so the motion detector in my stairwell would only turn the stairwell light on if the light I tapped into for power was on, too.

There was only one source of electricity I could reach in the attic that wasn't on a light switch -

 

About three quarters up the fireplace there's an electrical outlet. I crawled through the attic to the back of the fireplace and added a zip wire to it, then ran the other end of the zip to the stairwell. After a whole bunch of sweating in the attic and swearing at the top of my lungs I had a motion detector that turned on the light fixture whenever someone stood on the staircase.

It was great for a couple months but only for a couple months. My vision deteriorated too fast - a couple weeks ago the stairwell seemed almost as dark as it did before I put the ceiling light in.

Time for more lights.

If you've been in a movie theater you've probably noticed the lights they have in the aisles. Mounted about knee high and pointed down, they light up the walkway without shining upward and lighting up the theater. I decided to put one or two of those light fixtures on each stair in my staircase to illuminate the stair below it.

Two problems - first, there was no way to get under the stairs. It was all encased in sheet rock, there was no access to get under it to run the electric wiring. Second, I'd have to pull each riser off the staircase to install the lights and each riser had a stair tread locking it into place, so I'd have to pull off each stair tread, too.

The first problem I solved by cutting a big opening in the sheet rock and framing in a door. But something happened while I was planning to take all the risers and treads off the staircase. Call it serendipity.

Sometimes, when lighting conditions are just right, I see things that really surprise people, like the time I didn't notice a herd of cows 30 feet off the trail we were hiking but stopped so I wouldn't step on a caterpillar. How do I miss a heard of cows but see a caterpillar? I have no idea, but that kind of thing happens with surprising regularity.

My wife was driving us to Walmart on Franklin but instead of taking Franklin she took Starkey Road. I was looking out the window trying not to get car sick when I noticed a little sign above a store front in a small strip mall - a paint your own pottery shop.

I asked my wife to stop there on the way back from Walmart, took a picture of the business hours sign on the door, and asked my wife if I could take her on a pottery painting date.

A week later we painted a couple coffee mugs.

Hers is the red one, mine is a bright enough yellow that I can actually see it and looks like it was painted by a blind man.

What do these coffee mugs have to do with the staircase? The pottery shop has a kiln to fire the pottery. They also fire stained glass windows in their kiln.

That's when an idea started to form. Since I have to take out all the risers to wire them up with lights, and since I have to run electricity to every stair already, why not put the lights behind the risers and let them shine through some stained glass? That could be cool.

This seemed like a fun project. I wanted to do it. I thought I'd use the existing motion detector switch in the stairwell to power on the lights behind the stained glass windows. It seemed really exciting.

Just one problem - photophobia sucks. I'd be fine walking down the stairs but if I started from the bottom and walked up I'd be staring straight into bright light sources. Not good. Was there a way to wire this thing up so that only the stair I was standing on would turn on?

I'd have to run a switch to each stair. A pressure switch. And it couldn't be a press to turn on then press again to turn off, like the power switch on an old stereo system, it had to be always off unless there was pressure on it, like an old doorbell.

Thank goodness for Amazon.

I needed a way to attach the pressure switches to the stair treads. I figured I could use a small L bracket

Then attach the switch to the stringer. I bought some rubber washers for the stair treads to rest on. The stair treads aren't heavy enough to compress the rubber washers enough to push down on the pressure switch

But when enough weight is applied the tread drops down to rest on the stringer, low enough to press the switch

 

So far so good, but what about the stained glass plates?

I figured stiles and rails would work to build a frame with notches to hold the stained glass plates. I bought a cheap table saw from Harbor Freight, borrowed my across the street neighbor's chop saw, and got to work

It was time to install

But does it work?

There isn't much left to do. I'm putting laminate maple over the chocolate brown stair treads to brighten everything up

 

I've got some chair railing to add, some touch up painting to do, and a lot of sawdust to vacuum.

Special thanks to my wife for all her help, both for helping me match the colors of the stained glass so all the reds weren't at the top and all the blues on the bottom, and also for reading my tape measure to me, mudding and taping the sheet rock I damaged, pulling nails out of the old riser boards, and helping me find the screws I inevitably dropped on the floor. Sorry for all the profanity when things went wrong.

Thanks also to Zach, the across the street neighbor who offered me the use of his chop saw; and Pam, owner of The Glazed Bisque-It pottery shop, for all her patience trying to teach a blind man how to work with stained glass.