Well, at long last the great day has arrived - the stairs are in! Having lost a week-end collecting me from hospital, Mike spent Saturday routing and gluing and all sorts of things and then - with a huge amount of help from Dougie - the stairs were slotted in to place. Put together upstairs they had to be manouevered round corners and gently lowered down; turned out they were a wee bit tight -hence the crow bar - but now they fit perfectly. No screws at all, all careful fitting and a bit of glue. And I was able to christen them. Terrific.