More staircase headaches!

[Gene Davis]

How is it that these little houses I choose as training exercises create so many little dilemmas for me in Chief?

Take a look at the main floor plan below, clipped from the plans-seller's website. What is happening here is that a living room is sunk 12" down from the adjacent floor, accessed via two 6" steps down, one way around each side of the woodstove. On the staircase side of the woodstove, a stepdown is right past the landing step going up, the next is beyond the door to the staircase going down. Thus, the stairs UP begin at elevation zero, and the stairs DOWN begin down from elevation MINUS 6.

I framed it in Sketchup the same way the house gets framed, by dropping one big platform at LR level going to and just beyond the chimney hole, and doing "lay over" platforms to make the raised up "steps". See my SU screencap, in which I highlighted in red, the way the box-ups get done.

The stairs up from main to second begin with that framing transition, zero to minus 12, happening halfway across the lower section tread width. Those stair built OK in Chief.

The stairs from basement to main were "tricked" in the build in Chief, by setting the lowered platform at minus 6, not minus 12. I thought I could build the stairs and then lock them and move my platform back down to minus 12.

Chief did not react the way I wanted. Even with the stairs locked, the stairs from basement to main lowered the top reach when I lowered the deck.

What is the workaround here?

I was planning to do p'line solids to do the portion of floor that gets the block-up, but I cannot get beyond the stair building.