My place's previous tenant built and left a storage loft, which I have been accessing with a ladder for the past year (another reason why I was looking at this fascinating telescoping ladder). But it's difficult carrying heavy boxes up a ladder, and as the loft sat mostly unused while stuff piled up underneath it, I realized I was going to have to build a staircase.

The problem is that stairs take up a lot of space, and I had a hard time justifying giving up that space for something I'd only use occasionally; the loft is only big enough to store boxes, not serve as a room in its own right, so I'd be using the stairs perhaps twice a month.

What would be ideal is if the stairs somehow neatly disappeared when they weren't being used. I remembered seeing these neat fold-away stairs on all of the movie trailers that invade Manhattan every few weeks, and did some research into them.

Called scissor steps or camper steps and initially designed for RV's, they use simple scissoring mechanics to fold and unfold. They're manufactured by two companies seem to dominate the market, Oregon-based Step-Up Products and Canada's Victoria Industries Limited, which makes the ominously-named Hijacker line of foldaways.

The components are made from aluminum for the sake of weight--everything on an RV is designed to be as light as possible, to save on fuel--and some have a "double bar" design (pictured below, sorry about the crappy image), where the horizontals are comprised of two parallel bars for ridigity, which starts to become an issue when you go beyond two or three steps. The grip on the horizontal surfaces is provided by diamond-plate or the standard non-slip tread you see on skateboards.

These designs max out at 6 steps at a height of 48 inches, which meant I would unfortunately not be able to use them; my loft is about 7.5 feet tall. Stay tuned for Part 3 to see what I came up with instead.