When our old patio was removed, they took out the concrete poured steps as well, which meant we had no steps for quite some time coming out of the back of our house. Inconvenient, and a little dangerous. Our original plan was to go with stone steps that mimicked the look below all of our windows, but those steps come in only one rise, and we would have had to have three steps, and by code, that would have necessitated a hand rail, so we ditched that plan. Thankfully, with the roofing in the hands of someone else, I could focus on designing and building the stairs. We needed to have it so there was only 2 steps, and then the step into the house. Luckily, you are allowed a range of stair rises to meet code, and I could custom build these stairs out of wood and stick with 2 stairs. But what wood to use? I wanted natural, so I did rule out Trex and like products. I did want it to be low maintenance and naturally beautiful, so I ordered samples of several hardwoods like Ipe. Immediately upon receiving the samples, one stood out—massaranduba. This beautiful Brazilian hardwood has a deep reddish brown color naturally, with a very smooth finish, and is nearly as hard as Ipe. I custom ordered the hardwood, and it was a little expensive, but since I was doing just steps and not a huge deck, decided to make the investment. Now, I ordered a hardwood installation kit with this, that came with screws, massaranduba wood plugs, gorilla glue and a couple of countersink drill bits. Well, this hardwood made quick work out of those countersink bits, and the T-25 driver bits. I broke or wore out so many, that I was making regular trips to Lowe’s for new ones. I honestly don’t know how many drill bits I went through. Once countersunk, the screws are covered by the massaranduba plugs, and then cut off and sanded down. I really like the look of the wood plugs, I think they add to the look. The end result greatly expanded the stepping surface coming out of our house, making it much safer than the old poured concrete steps. I ran the steps all the way under the doors up to the chimney, that way, if somebody needs something to hold onto, they can leverage the chimney. These steps were such an improvement, I decided to do a bonus project and use some of the scrap wood from the roof to build out our steps in our garage too!