Stairway Progress

I’ve been spending much of my free time prepping the stair risers and painting the new treads.  I believe a lot of work has been done, but you wouldn’t know it looking at our staircase. (You can see what it started at as here.)  This is still what it looks like:

(Though you may notice that one of these treads is not like the others.  That’s actually one of the new treads.  More on that later.)

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you probably know that I HATE prep work.  I am so impatient and I just want to see things done.  Right! Now!

This project is a killer for me because it’s pretty much all prep work.  When I tore up the carpet, we realized we’d need to buy new treads.  We also realized that the risers weren’t nice and smooth and ready for paint, so I’ve spent the past few days sanding…

 (Yeah, nice view.)

and filling holes…

and vacuuming up the dust I created…

 (With my new vacuum that is completely awesome!)

And painting.  Luckily, I have something that will make many of you jealous: my very own painting room.  Inside my house!

People keep trying to store things like dining tables and pianos in my paint room, so I’m constantly having to move them and work around them, but still I shouldn’t complain.

The new treads and paneling for the landing now have two coats of primer and one coat of black paint.  The risers have been primed in white, so I’m getting close to being done with the painting.  (Or at least round one of the painting.)

Once the treads are done, we are going to take the existing treads off, one by one, and put the new ones down.  Sounds easy, right?

Weeeelllll……

We needed to test to make sure the new treads would work before I started painting, so last Sunday, I respectfully asked my husband to pull up one of the treads for a test.

The 9 screws came up pretty quickly…but the stair didn’t.  Next, he started prying up the 9 nails.  Not so bad, but a lot of work.  Still, the stair stayed put.  Clearly something was still holding it down, but we couldn’t see anymore screws or nails.

Eventually, my husband started gouging out the top of the stair with a chisel to see if he could find the offending nail/screw.  He didn’t find it, but it did weaken the stair enough such that we could pull up on each side and break it off.  That’s when we saw the screw that had been holding it in.  Just hiding there.  Little bugger – we showed it.

That took about 45 minutes – to take off JUST ONE stair tread.  As I’m watching this, I’m starting a very low panic thinking there is no way he’s going to be willing to do this 10 more times.  I started coming up with alternatives, but that stair had clearly issued a challenge to my husband and he wasn’t going to let it go by.  He just kept systematically working at it and teaching me about patience.

Clearly the old stair tread wasn’t going to be going back in, so we ended up putting in the new one.  I think it looks very nice and they look even nicer once painted!

My hope plan is to have everything painted by this weekend, so we can start replacing the treads.  I, of course, picked the worst possible week to start this project since I’m spending my evenings at Girl Scout camp and will not be able to work on it at all next week, but when you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough and it’s best to put that energy to work when you got it.

Stay tuned!