Building stairs from the basement up through a foundation

[Twinmum]

This is crazy, the Sims can use the stairs going down but not up. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that before. Usually if there is something preventing Sims from using something, it's across the board, they either can use something or they can't use something. I've never had problems with Sims using stairs built in this fashion before. I wonder if EA have changed a bit of coding somewhere.

**edit**  I'm wondering if you lot may be bugged CowgirlBlues. I've just gone and built stairs like this on another block and my Sim can walk down them, wander around in the basement and then walk up the stairs. Did you use any cheats when building the house? I know sometime if you save a file while a cheat is still active, it can make the lot act in strange ways sometimes.

**additional edit** OK, I started on a fresh lot, built a foundation basement with stairs going down. Added a set of stairs above the lower stairs and sent in the building inspector. He was able to use the stairs in both directions. So then I went to CowgirlBlues house and built a copy of the basement next to the original house, brought in the inspector and he can't come up the stairs! So then I moved him to a different block where we built another foundation basement and again he can't come up the stairs. It's when the stairs are stacked, but what I can't understand is why on some blocks it works and others it doesn't. I do have a few thoughts, it could be something to do with blocks being bulldozed, but I need to test this a bit more before I make a decision.

[Twinmum]

First up sorry for a double post, but I thought it needed bring to the front again even for a short time.

I am beginning to hate stairs in the Sims 3 lol
I downloaded CowgirlBlues' lovely ranch to see if I could work out what the problem was that she was having with stacked stair cases and the answer is that there shouldn't have been a problem. I've built those stairs time and time again with no trouble. So I did some testing and found the results were less then regular.
First up, I did a bit of remodeling on her block and built a duplicate house next to her' and had the same problem. I tried a few things and when nothing worked, I thought that perhaps the lot might have been bugged from maybe saving while a cheat was still activated, but further testing showed that that probably was not the problem.
Next I built basically the same thing on a fresh lot and when I tried the stairs they worked. I did this on a few different lots and they all worked. This led me to think that the problem might have been something to do with the fact that when I placed the lot after downloading it, I had to bulldoze a lot to be able to place it. So, I began building on all the empty lots, but after a few, I ran into the problem that they didn't work.
My next thought was it was to do with the size of the block (Cowgirl's house was on a large block and I had also bulldozed a few large lots to try) but when I checked the size of the lots I had tried, it turned out that I had tried 2 20x30 original lots and on one the stairs worked and on the other they didn't work. All this testing was done in a fresh game file too, so they were not built on lots that may have had something before that I had demolished.
So the conclusion is less than conclusive. It seems that whether stacked stairs are usable or not is a bit of hit and miss. I'll do some more testing in different neighbourhoods and see if there is possibly some factor that determines if they work or not. No matter what the results, though, I'll have to make some sort of note to add to the tutorial on stairs so people don't tear their hair out thinking they did something wrong lol