1. Adding Stairs to Your House
Punch! Home Design
Adding Stairs to Your House

2. Setting Up Your Room Layout
We want to make sure that there is room on the first floor for the stairs to be placed AND room on the second floor to have the opening for the stairs. Stairs in this example will go in the bottom right corner of the layout.
First Floor
Second Floor

3. Straight Stairway Tool
Make sure that you are on the first floor of your house and then click on the stairs tool and make sure that you choose the straight stairway tool. Then click on the blueprint where you want the stairs to begin. I chose two feet from the east wall and three feet from the south wall.

4. Straight Stairway Tool
After clicking once to start the bottom of the stairs, move the cursor north to the edge of the room (or around 10 feet). Double click the mouse and your stairs will be made. The software will only make the staircase as long as needed, so don’t worry if the end anchor is too far away.

5. Moving the Stairway
Once the stairs are built, click on them so the entire stairway is yellow. Then use the arrow keys on the keyboard to ‘nudge’ the stairs to the exact spot you want.
Highlight to Select
Use Arrow Keys to Move

6. Creating the 2nd Floor Opening
Take a look at the second floor of your house and you’ll notice that the stairs stick up through the floor and there isn’t any way to get up to the second floor!

7. Floor Cutout Tool
We can fix this situation by cutting out the floor and creating a stairwell on the second floor. To do this click on the down arrow next to the Floor Tool and choose Floor Cutout. Draw a box around your stairs on the second floor. I like to do cutouts in the corners of the room.
My Floor Cutout

8. Adjusting the Floor Cutout
If we stopped here, we’d have a weird looking border around our floor cutout. To fix this we need to change the thickness of the floor cutout to ½” from the inspector window and also change the object elevation to the “Room Floor”. After this you’ll have a perfect cutout!

9. Straight Railing Tool
The last step is to add a railing so nobody falls over the hole in the floor! You can add a railing by clicking on the Straight Railing tool at the top of the screen. Click on the end of one side of your floor cutout and then double-click on the opposite end. Depending on where your cut-out is, you may need to make a railing on more than one side.

10. Your Finished Stairway!