Vacant Stair - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 163

Back in D.C., we cautiously congratulated ourselves on having successfully completed the
two main floors of the house.
There was just one problem—they didn't connect.
To get from the upper floor to the lower, you had to walk along the upper breezeway,
unlock the gate, descend a short flight of stairs into our neighbor's driveway, walk down the
main road that runs beside the house, swing into our own driveway, unlock the carport gate
and enter the second floor breezeway.
I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
If we rented out the house as a three-bedroom unit (think parents upstairs, children
down), the guests would think we had lost our marbles and demand a refund.
It wasn't as if we hadn't foreseen this problem. Steve had, in fact, produced a number of
spiffy designs to solve it. But this was before he'd gotten sick and work had fallen behind
schedule and we had spent a lot more money than we expected.
In short, it had been a problem that was easy to ignore—until it wasn't.
Which was now.
We pulled out Steve's designs and reconsidered. Each was ingenious in its own way and
yet there was something indefinably wrong with all of them. I couldn't quite put my finger
on it. And then the problem hit me: all of the staircases were situated on the exterior of the
house.
Whatever our little casa's architectural shortcomings might have been, it was nonethe-
less a perfectly contained unit, a large rectangular block with balconies on two sides and
unadorned façades on the other two. Steve's staircases would need to be appended to one
of the two balcony façades and would, in essence, violate the integrity of the structure. That
didn't seem right.
We racked our tired brains for a solution.
For a brief moment we considered putting the staircase on the garden side , where at least
it wouldn't be an eyesore from the road. But to make this work we'd have to break through
the exterior walls to install at least one and maybe two new doors. And although we were
admittedly desperate for a solution, we were pretty sure we lacked the intestinal fortitude to
endure another demolition project.
The logical fallback, of course, was to put the staircase inside. Hailing as we did from
a latitude where staircases are almost always found indoors, this seemed to make perfect
sense.
But it didn't take us long to figure out that staircases gobble up a great deal of square
footage—we'd have to sacrifice a hefty amount of living space if we chose this option. Also,
the few places where it made sense to locate the head of the staircase on the upper level
made no sense at all in the corresponding space below.
In desperation we turned to magazines.