I won’t go into a “Bad design” rant…… The reason these steps were invented and are used is to allow a door over the wheels. (There is no space to stick the standard fold up steps.) This greatly increases flexibility in design. However, in this particular setup there is a problem: With the slide out the door cannot open far enough to let the stairs up or down. In addition, by the nature of their design the stairs have to be FULLY down for the door to open or close. So here’s the scenario:

You pull into a rest area with the long RV parking spaces along and next to a sidewalk. You have the room to open the slide on that side… but since the stairs cannot go all the way down due to the curb you can’t close the door…… You also can’t put the stairs back up as the door won’t open all the way with the slide out…..

There are a few solutions….. Operate the slides from the outside with the stairs up, reaching through them…. A pain. Or, open the slide, then the other side as far as you can, but enough to get from the garage to the living room, then close the door side slide, bring the stairs up, close the door and open the slide again standing inside… three movements of the slide where you only need one. Madness.

(In addition to this there are the limitations on slide operation discussed HERE)

Lastly, if you don’t lower the levelers the stairs creak/click. Makes sense. Coach is sitting on the suspension and moving, stairs are solidly on the ground. So there is movement at the hinge, and thus noise. Mildly annoying. (Aft stairs don’t have this problem as they hang in the air and don’t sit on the ground.)

So I came up with the following: Make the stairs removable. There’s the entry in the back, you don’t really need two sets of stairs, unless maybe when you’re parked somewhere for a while and you have guests in the garage whom you want to give some privacy. Now you can reach or step up there via the wheel and operate the slides. The stairs are held to the top bracket/hinge with eight rivets:

A little drilling and there we go:

Pull the pins and the stairs come right off. Can’t bring the hinge inside unless the slide is in though. (Door won’t open far enough.) And, now there is the question of where to put the stairs. I can put them in the garage, but I’m trying to keep the clutter down in there. There is a possibility of making a slide in rack underneath. Or, I can just leave it home. Which is what I am doing. Not only that, tired of climbing over the hinge I removed that too. And leave it all home. It’s still and emergency exit, and I can get in and out for the slide extension/retraction either with help of the wheel or using one of these:

And on the inside I put a curtain in front of the door to make it go away completely. Much better.