Stairway Progress (or Will This EVER Be Done?!)

We’ve added several more hours of labor to the stairs this weekend and they’re really starting to come together.  I’m starting to get excited, but there are so many little niggling things to finish, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever actually be done.

On Saturday, the stairs looked like this:

Clearly on the right track, but lots and lots of filled nail holes to sand down and then paint and the landing still creaked!

I started the morning by sanding down the wood filler and then got to work painting the stairs!  I hate to tape and I didn’t want tape marring the beauty that would be revealed as I painted, so I decided to paint the edges by hand with a small paint brush.  Possibly not the wisest or most efficient choice, but definitely one that is all me.

Important safety tip: if you’re painting your stairs, make sure you paint every other stair, so that you and your family can still go up and down the stairs while they dry.  Also, lock up your animals!  Luckily, this time around, I followed both of those tips.

Sunday, I painted the alternating stairs and then we left to spend the day at the fair!

While I was painting, my husband was busy hammering.  He put just about a million nails into the boards on the landing  and now it doesn’t creak!  Of course, it looks like this now:

 

Do you see all those little specs of paint or dirt?  No, those are all nails.  I’m going to have so much work to do to make those all mostly invisible, but it is so worth it to have a quiet floor!

And here’s what my stairs look like now:

(Look, you don’t even need to cross your eyes!)

 

Getting so close!  I still need to:

[  ]  Fill in nail holes on landing

[  ]  Re-paint landing

[  ]  One last coat of black on all stairs

[  ]  Touch up white paint and caulk

[  ]  Finish trim on front of landing

[  ]  Add floor molding to landing

And then I’ll be done!  Probably.  Well, then I want to paint the walls in the entry way with the dizzy-ingly high ceilings, add a great molding treatment to the walls going up the stairs, and figure out how to decorate these things (any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated):

THEN I’ll be done.  But for now, I’ll just enjoy my progress so far: