Brick on stairs indoors? Alternate ideas?
I used to read this forum a lot when I was designing and building a house in 2006. Looks like it doesn’t have the traffic it used to. I sure got a lot of smart advice from the posters here back then. Now I find myself moving to a 1964 house that needs a little work so I thought I’d come back.
My question is about stairs. The house is a modern bilevel with a beautiful brick entry. Downstairs, we are uncovering the original multicolored slate tile. Upstairs, we’re replacing a lot of carpeting and 80s tile with cork plank. The stairs are currently carpeted, and look very bad. We would like to cover them in thin brick, thinking that would be the best choice to transition from tile to cork without adding yet another flooring material. A mason we hired to do some exterior work will not do it. He says that the wood stair frame will flex too much and the brick and mortar will crack.
Is there a way to accomplish this with brick? If not, what material should we consider to prevent a crazy patchwork of flooring materials? Cork requires another material for nosing. Slate might look out of place leading to the upper level. Thanks in advance.
Replies
You can't put any type brick directly on wood treads nor would you want to. At a minimun you'd need a well bonded piece of 1/2' cement board on the tread first then the pavers. That would create a tread height problem that would raise the rise of each of your steps at least an inch and shorten the height of the last riser by one inch, a dangerous situation.
Thank you. That's the info I needed. Exploring other options!
One could conceiveably use thin brick (or some brick-like composite) on a resilent bed with flexible grout. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some composite somewhere made for this specific application.
Well no, you can't. Period.
It's a bit difficult to sort out from the Wayfair spam, but there are a number of different brick patterned laminate floorings available. Some fairly realistic, some not so.
Cork stair nosings are available, so you can continue the cork floor on the stairs.