stairway to heaven

yes, we had a roofer change our hatch in our coop to a kind on a spring, perhaps it was pneumatic, which made opening and closing the hatch much easier.  we did not change the iron ladder…it was a common roof.  there may be room at the bottom of the ladder for an angled ladder like a ships ladder, with sections that slide into each other, that is easier to climb…I have seen photos of this for roof access.  the angle is fairly steep, so these ladders can be put in fairly small spaces.  the real problem for access, as I see it, is the hauling yourself onto the roof once you get to the top of the ladder…you would need an enclosure with a railing around it to grab onto to make this easier, but I would think even this would be awkward with basically a hole and retractable ladder.  depending on how much improvement you want to make, the only truly easy access is to build it out from inside your apartment…and I mean the kind with a regular staircase, usually one that has a landing and turns midway up….but you lose floorspace to do this, though you can work in storage underneath.  sometimes, there is room for a straight staircase along the long wall of a room.  you essentially build a small structure on the roof, so that you can walk up the stairs and out, without hauling yourself up over the edge of a hole.  some save on the space taken by a footprint of a staircase by using a metal spiral staircase, but I hate walking up and down them with dinner, etc., so much that I passed up many apartments with them to a private roof, as I did not think roof access was worth it without a real staircase.  true roof acessibility, to me, is an actual, not spiral, staircase. then you can furnish the decking with a table and chairs, some shade, and use it as an additional room.  I would look into space and money to do this, before I would spend to make essentially a fancier hole to crawl out of.  It was so much easier to crawl out the hatch hole of my first Brooklyn apartment thirty years ago…it only gets harder as years go by.

We did a job once where we enlarged the hatch opening, installed a hinged hatch with a pneumatic stay that helped lift and gently close the hatch (like in a hatchback car), and a set of pull-down attic stairs.  Together, it made the hatch easier to get to and get through.