I am in the process of converting our housed stringer stairs to an open stringer format and have some questions about placement of the stringers. We have an L-shaped stairway going from the first floor to the second floor (see attached) and a straight stair way going from the first floor to the basement (see attached).
I feel comfortable removing the housed stringers and replacing them with sawtooth stringers to open it up. However, the problem I discovered is the ceiling in the stairway leading to the basement is directly screwed to the housed stringer of the stairway leading to the second floor (see attached).
In other words, if i replace that housed stringer with a sawtooth stringer, the ceiling in the basement stairway will have to be lowered considerably.
I could move the wall in an inch on each side of the stairway going to the basement to hide the stringer, but that seems like a lot of extra work for minimal gain.
Any ideas on how I can do this without moving the wall and ceiling in the basement stairway (also, i realize that the ceiling will have to come down in the basement stairway during the project, thats no problem)? The goal is to keep the basement stairway as wide and tall as possible while still keeping the drywall there.
Thanks a lot in advance!