Today my oldest is 9. He is so sweet and so kind.
I am so glad everyday that he belongs to me, and I am mortified that he has grown up with no ability for me to stop it.
I am most likely coloring my hair red on Saturday. In other words, I may be experiencing a mid life crisis.
When one experiences a crisis, change is needed.
Evidently, in my case, a lot of changes in paint.
May I present our entry. Or...a source of angst for me.
It is tiny. Teeny tiny. We removed the original banister long ago and that helped to open it up, but I have always felt like I needed to do something fun with this little space. Something that says "Hey! This is our house. We are fun."
I painted the stairs grey and white after we moved in but have never been very happy with them. They were just OK in my book.
The stairs going downstairs. Ugh! So gross.
Old dirty white carpet + moving in + having a furnace replaced + painting and construction = Well...our carpet.
So I did what any perfectly sane person would do...I looked for things to decorate the entry. "Cute it up" if you will. No luck.
The space is too small to allow anything on the floor, and the walls are just weird enough to make it hard to put something on them.
The next logical step? Redoing the stairs.
I started by using a paint stripper to strip the paint. I used Citristrip that is not caustic and smells nice. Worked like a charm. Granted I could only do every other step at a time. Not that that stopped my kids from asking every 2 seconds if they could walk on the orange stairs.
You apply the stripper to the paint in a thick coat. Then after about 30 minutes or so the paint starts to bubble.
The longer you leave it on the better it works. I applied it to the bottom stairs and left it on overnight and in the morning I used a scraper and peeled the paint up in sheets. It was very liberating.
When I had gotten all of the paint off that I could, I got to sanding. When I started to sand the first step I realized that the treads were actually real wood. So I was struck with the idea that I would stain the treads to match our wood floors. Seemed easy enough.
After a couple days of sanding and stripping and a little help from Penny I was half way there.
It was taking longer then I thought...but I was not detoured. The stairs were going to look great. When I was almost done with the upstairs I ran out of sanding disks so I had to make a trip to Home Depot.
While there I decided to check out their wood stains. I talked to a worker and he assured me that the picture on the front of the containers were close to what the color would be. So, I carefully picked out a color, that would match our wood floors. I also asked him about the spots in our wood treads. He assured me that he thought they would look great when they were all stained. So off I went.
When I got home I couldn't help but try a little stain on the corner of the stair. I was just so excited.
Excitement quickly turned to sadness. The stain was RED on our stairs, not the honey pecan color it promised.
Not only that, but the little nicks in the stairs that I was concerned about? They wouldn't absorb the stain. Whatever they had filled the little holes with, back in the day, was not taking the stain...so therefore it looked like someone had spilled flour on our stairs.
With my dreams of matching wood stairs down the toilet, I turned to the only place I could think of. Pinterest.
I boiled it down to these painted stairs as my options for Blake to pick out of:
I couldn't help but think that something fun might be just what our entry needed.
Which one did Blake prefer? The most traditional one.
Which one did I fancy? The loudest of the bunch.
So I started to prime the stairs. Starting at the top and working my way down, with still no idea which one I was going to use.
I asked my friend. I asked her husband. Then I asked Blake again and again and again.
He left the decision up to me.
You would figure if left up to me I would choose the flowers. I didn't.
I choose traditional.
Painting the stairs, has so far, taken a week. I am using oil based paint so it takes longer to dry. Plus, working around "living" in the home has proven to be challenging.
The stairs going up are the only ones getting painted at the moment. The ones going down are coming next.
But the paint...it is shiny and smooth and lovely.
And, although this is a round about way right back to where we started, I am already much happier with the outcome.
Even if I still have a couple more coats left...and even if the floral stairs are still a little tempting.
Now, I am just trying to convince Blake that maybe fun tile could spice up the entry. Maybe something like this:
He is NOT on board. Turkey.
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