Part of the name of my Blog is ” Impulsively”, and I often live up to the name. Most of the time my impulsive actions work out. I try something, if I don’t like it, I move it around, change the color or reimagine my idea until it works. Other times, I try something and there is no getting away from the result!
One such instance is when I decided to refinish the stairs. How hard could it be? Sand, stain and polyurethane, easy breezy! Wrong! The story begins, two and a half years ago, when I decided to refinish the stairs leading to the second floor of our home. My husband, who was out of town at the time, ( he is the Ying to my Yang) can usually talk me down from doing something I may regret! But being left to my own devices, I started pulling off the medallions on the risers ( I had put in years ago) to prep the stairs for refinishing.
The problems began when I was pulling off the medallions. When I took them off chunks of the riser were coming off with them. I had forgotten I glued them on. When I was done, I had twelve stair risers with gouges in them. Not a pretty sight.
At this point, most people would have stopped. Not me. I kept going. I took out the sander and started on the treads. Hours later, with sawdust everywhere, I was ready to stain. I started putting on the stain and it looked blotchy. I put stain on four treads and all had the same blotchy look. Apparently, I had not gotten all the polyurethane and stain off when I sanded. Picture this… the risers have gouges in them and the treads are partially sanded with four of them unevenly stained. Ugh! There was nothing I could do at that point except cut my losses. My husband was generous when he came home saying it did not look that bad. We both agreed, that sometime in the future, we would have them professionally refinished. Cut to two and a half years later and living with this disaster the entire time. By this time I had stopped coming in the front door. I could not face it day in and day out. After all that time, we had put that on a must have list during the addition/renovation. Hallelujah!
This is the medallion I was talking about. I really liked how they looked when I originally put them on, but eventually felt they were dated.
I had to really get underneath to get it to come off.
Some of them came off cleanly, but most looked like this.
You can see how unevenly the treads took the stain.
This is what greeted me everyday until I decided to come through the garage to avoid it.
As part of the addition/renovation, the wall was opened up and another rail was added. We built three new newel posts for the bottom and top of the stairs.
These are how the stairs look now. Time to use the front entrance again!
Love the double newel posts. Look at that sightline into my office!
What a joy to walk in the front door now!
Project update: They are coming to install the vent for the range hood this week. Once that is done we can have the backsplash put up. Then the kitchen, except for the pantry, will be done! Can not wait to share it with you!