HouseWorks: Simple stair-building basics

Late last fall I got an email from a friend, John, looking for advice on building a new set of stairs going down into the basement of the house he’s renovating. John is pretty handy with tools, but designing the support structure for stairs was new to him. His question and my answers apply to any stair-building project you might run into, so I thought you’d like to listen in and learn. Stairs seem complicated, but the basics of creating the shape and angle of the staircase skeleton i