Spiral Staircase

Most everyone who comes to my house falls in love with the spiral staircase that goes upstairs to my bedroom.  It looks cool but boy can it be a pain in the rear.

The first reason they’re a pain is because you can’t just carry laundry up and down in a basket.  Bringing laundry down is easy, I throw it over the edge.  Taking laundry up, a different story.  It tends to sit on the chair in the living room until I feel like getting a workout carrying it up the stairs.  It’s quite the workout no matter how you look at it.  I either try going up with one of the baskets in front of me, hitting the railing at every step, almost falling backwards, then readjusting, then one more step.  The 11 stairs seem like a marathon at that point, on those days, I don’t need to go to the gym (at least that’s my excuse).  The other way is to take the laundry without a basket.  I approach this like I approach carrying in groceries, I have to do it in one trip (what is it with that?).  Normally that ends in defeat, the clothes fall everywhere or end up on the steps and I have to go back to get them anyway.

The second reason they’re a pain is because they’re made of wood, slippery wood.  If I forget and take the stairs down in socks I’m pretty much doomed to spend a step or two on my butt and no matter how much padding I have there, it still hurts like a bugger.

There’s also the issue of possibly drinking too much.  Spiral staircases are not your friend when too many adult beverages have been consumed.  I have to plan accordingly when I have company and figure out what it is they will be doing……do I dare put them up in my room or not? 

A perfect example of the biggest reason the stairs are bad is yesterday morning at 12:11 AM I woke up in excruciating pain.  Stomach cramps and a headache.  By the time I reached for my phone, checked the time and started across the room I knew it was going to be a close call.  I’m pretty sure I don’t have to go into detail about what exactly the close call was going to be so I won’t.  As I shuffled across the floor upstairs it hits me that I have to make it down “the stairs” (play some horror movie music in your head right here).  Immediately I start to sweat and clench.  As I’ve mentioned, they’re not only spiral, they’re wood.  That morning they’re wasn’t exactly time to be careful so I said a silent prayer and took them as fast as I could.  As fast as I could was barely fast enough, through the living room, through the kitchen to relief.  As I said a silent “thank you” I realized what I was really thankful for was that I didn’t finally have a story to tell around the campfire about having an “accident”.

Spiral stairs are nice to look at but before installing them in your house make sure you have a comfortable couch to sleep on that’s safely on the first floor and near a bathroom.