How heavy can particle board really be?

Dutch stairs are closer to ladder rungs than they are stairs. They are steep, with narrow width, and have exceptionally shallow treads. For some unknown reason, they also curve as they ascend making the tread depths even narrower on one side. After a week of living in our new home, we are still climbing our stairs with hands and feet when we ascend, and doing everything we can to not break our necks as we descend.

The engineer in me has run some rough calculations based on angle of ascent, tread depth, stair width, and degrees of curvature to calculate a mass effort for weight carried up Dutch stairs:

             2      ascent_angle    width - curve

mass_effort = weight   +   —---------------   +  e      

                                            π 

In other words, if you’re attempting to carry an eleven pound box up the stairs in our Amsterdam home, the effort is equivalent to carrying 147 pounds.

Before we arrived in Amsterdam (and fully understood the definition of “stairs” in Dutch), we ordered a house-full of furniture from Ikea. One of the options was to pay extra to have the delivery people deliver the beds to their bedroom locations. As both Laura and I are usually up for saving a buck (Euro?) we debated the extra cost, but in the end opted to splurge. Wow. Who knew this would totally be worth the cost?

The funny thing is when the delivery men showed up with all our stuff, I sheepishly showed them our stairs and informed them one of the beds was going up to a room on the third floor. Rather than show any displeasure, our dude (here forward known as “Atlas”) merely picked up a ~6 foot long box densely packed with about 50 lbs of particle board (which I calculate would require ~2750 lbs of effort), and walked up the stairs with complete ease. He may have been talking on his cell phone at the same time.

He did this twice… with me following on all fours so I could show him where to put stuff.

The more amazing thing is that stairs are even worse in the older parts of Amsterdam. It’s very common to find three- and four-story narrow houses with stairs so crazy that the only way to furnish rooms above the ground floor is with a hook and pulley system built into nearly every building along the canals that allows for lifting furniture up and through a front facing window. 

Once again, this seems to be yet another instance of the Dutch making the most efficient use of each square meter of area within their living space.