Our house has two stories, which means it has stairs. Every time we're faced with the prospect of moving (which has been six times in nearly seven years of marriage), I declare that I would like to live in place with no stairs. Stairs make the moving in/out process far worse than it would be without stairs. In daily life, the term "all the way upstairs" or "all the way downstairs" translates to "not worth getting."
In the six places we've lived in our marriage, however, none of them have been stair-less. We've had bare concrete stairs, concrete stairs covered in tile, bare wooden stairs, and wooden stairs covered in carpet. Some have been creaky, some have been dangerously steep, some claustrophobia-inducing, some "awkward," some cracked and falling apart. In other words, I don't tend to think kindly on stairs1. The stairs in our current home are no exception. Let me walk you through a journey up them:
