Sunday, March 22, 2009

My stair project

This weekend, I started my stair project.

I had one at my last house too. It was a LOT of work. It was hell. But it was beautiful when it was done.

The difference with this project? More stairs, more surfaces to be stripped, probably can't even strip them -- must chip paint off in many cases -- and won't look nearly as nice when I'm done. But will look better than they do now.

Now, they are horrible.

My house renovations are really coming along. I have a front hall closet, a bay window seat with hidden seat storage, open kitchen shelves with lighting and glass shelves. A basement door, even. And my stairs are a complete mess.

So I decided to stop hemming and hawing and just get to work.

Down to Home Depot, I bought sand paper and pliers and brought out the chisel and palm sander. Two days later, I've taken out hundreds of carpet stables, done a rough scrape of the steps, sanded the steps, and started scraping the paint off the risers. Started. Two days of work and there's still so much more to do.

I did a test step, stripping it. I decide pretty quickly not to do it that way. Too much work for not enough pay back. The wood is not good anyway. I'm just going to paint them, so why bother stripping? but I have to scrape paint off the risers and the side of the stairs because someone did a horrible goopy paint job somewhere along the way and it look lumpy and pretty much comes off in large slices once you get going.

It's almost as enjoyable as picking the nail polish off your nails.

But it's slow going. This is going to be my project for next couple of months. Ugh.

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