Mark and I graduated from Purdue University. I was a marketing major, Mark an engineering major.
I have more of the soft skills, while Mark has more of the hard skills. That makes us a good team and a good complement for owning and running a hotel!
My soft skills helped me work with our team, communicating with guests and while Mark did those things as well, his strength was with the hard skills, the technical stuff.
His technical skills helped design a crane or in the case of our next project, design a set of stairs.
Our hotel was shut down now for more than a month in 2020 during the Covid pandemic. Mark and I wanted to make the time as productive as possible, so we looked around for projects we could do.
One of our treehouse villas was located down a steep, gravel path toward our yoga platform and waterfall hiking trail. Many guests commented on the good and bad of this path. Sometimes when walking down the path the gravel could be slippery. When making the trek back up to the hotel common area, phew, that was some steep incline.
I walked the path between that villa and the common area many times. It took me 102 paces. I counted. Every time.
For our next project, Mark decided that we would design some stairs for the path to make it easier to navigate, and then we would ask a local contractor we knew to build them.
Design stairs? How do you do that?
I had no idea and wouldn’t even know where to begin. I’m pretty sure Mark didn’t take an engineering class called ‘Stair Design’ in college, but he seemed to have an idea. Again. Don’t ask me HOW he knew how to do this, but it was somewhere in his brain. He’s technically hard-wired! (I’ve said how resourceful he is, haven’t I?!) 😉
Mark said we needed to figure out how steep the slope was so we would know the number of stairs we needed and how far apart they should be. Uh, huh…ok.
How do you measure the incline of a slope?
Again, I had no idea. Mark did.
As he explained how we were going to do this, I stared at him with a blank look and shook my head, confused. As I write this now, it still confuses me. 💁🏻♀️
So, it’s best if I let him explain it in his words here!
It would have been easy just to tell our contractor to start at the top of the slope and work his way down installing steps, but who knows what we would have ended up with? Would the stairs have been uniformly spaced and uniform in height? Would someone’s right leg or left leg have to do all the work when climbing up? How would we know how many steps there would be and how much stone to order?
I decided we needed to survey the slope first and work out a design that I could give to the contractor. Without any modern equipment like a laser-level or surveying equipment, I decided we would use a water-level. The Romans used water-levels when they built the aqueducts, but theirs were made of wood. Ours was a long clear rubber tube.
The idea worked liked this. We started at the top of the slope by placing one bamboo rod at the top and another rod a few meters downhill. We then measured the distance between the bamboo rods and used the water-level in the rubber tube to figure out how much lower the lower rod was. Knowing the distance between the two rods and the change in height, I could figure out how steep was that portion of the slope. Then we would repeat the process over and over all the way down the slope until we had an accurate model of the whole slope. Once we knew the exact contour of the slope, it was easy to determine how many steps we needed, how tall each one should be, and how they should be spaced. Knowing all that, I could order the stone and give a drawing to our contractor.
If you followed that, great!
I was there and I’m still confused!
All I remember is that I sat at the top of the path with my bamboo rod while Mark walked down with his bamboo rod and the water-filled tube. Because of our covid security plan, I towed our ‘carry-with-us-at-all-times’ backpacks as I moved down the path with my rod. I tried to keep my bamboo rod and my end of the tube still while we proceeded down the path measuring. When the water was level, I’d wait until Mark sketched in his notebook and then I’d move down with my rod again. Over and over. A few hundred feet till the end.
Does this make sense to you? There was for sure some complex technical math that he learned put to good use here!
When we were done with the measuring and Mark had all his slope computations, he computed the number of stairs we needed, their rise and slope.
I think that’s what’s going on in this picture!
Then he sketched the final drawing to give to the contractor showing the distance and the number of stones we’d need-in metric and Spanish, of course! 🤦🏻♀️
If our Costa Rican contractor understood this mumbo-jumbo, he must have technical skills also!
While Mark finished his math magic, after a long mind-blowing day, I used MY best techno-wizardry skill.
I used a wine opener to pop open a cold bottle of Chardonnay. 🍾
The stairs got built to the correct Mark-designed specs and they worked great!


Thanks for reading! Thanks to our alma mater Purdue University, and to my resourceful husband! ILY 💜
That was so interesting! It would have been fun to watch the process!
This is unbelievable, Marlo! Fantastic job by Mark and the ability of your local contractor to comprehend it all. Making them equal in size must have been--tough! Love his ingenuity and can-do attitude, well, for both of you!!