Well, hello there. Two days in one week. I'm just as shocked as you are. Writing the post for the office made me remember how much I enjoy writing for the blog and documenting our trials and tribulations. Down the road, I imagine it'll be fun looking back to remind ourselves of the progress we made. Without further ado, two more before and afters...
The Floors.
You may have noticed these beauties in the office pictures. One of the first things we did after moving in (well, technically two months after moving in) was have new hardwoods installed throughout the first floor. When we took possession of the house, there were five different types of flooring, six if you count the plywood, yes, plywood.
- Original hardwood in the front bedrooms
- Newer hardwood in the front entryway and area outside the kitchen
- Tile #1 in the kitchen
- Tile #2 in the family room
- The most disgusting, stained, stinky carpet I've ever seen before in the back bedroom, now office
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| Here you can see: Kitchen Tile, Newer Hardwood, Plywood, and Family Room Tile |
G$ and I (ok, entirely G$) did all the demoing of the existing flooring. I got outfitted in the safety gear for the photo-op, then let G$ finish it. How nice of me. :)
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| Making it look like I did the demo |
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| The fun of floor demo. The original hardwood floors were installed in 1953 with old school nails. We saved them, so I need to figure out something cool to do with them. |
We did the demo, but for the sake of both time and staying married, we opted to pay to have the floors installed. Since there were so many types of flooring and we were dealing with an addition, we had to have 5/8 inch plywood installed throughout to level the floors before the installation. I'm not going to lie, but even the consistent plywood throughout looked better than what was there when we bought the house. Plus it was
clean!
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| Nice, level plywood subfloor |
Between the plywood and the hardwood, it took the installers about three days to complete. When they were finished, we had beautiful new hand-scraped hardwood floors. I don't think I've ever been so giddy. I could finally walk barefoot in my own house again! Without fear of the previous owners' filth or tiny pieces of broken tile getting all over the bottom of my feet.
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| Installation |
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| A little before & after |
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| Ahh, beautiful! |
The Stairs.
Now that our beautiful hardwood floors were installed, it made the golden oak stairs look
really out of place. I had seen
numerous blog posts (are you noticing a theme here...) where folks re-stained/painted their stairs with the two-tone effect -- white risers and railing spindles/balusters with dark (stain or black paint) on the tops of the stairs. Each and every one's only regret was that they didn't do it sooner. I was sold!
I decided to take off the two days after Christmas, so with the weekend, it gave me four days to tackle the project. Three weeks later, I finally finished. Although, it was a painful, tedious process that took
way longer than I estimated (that always seems to happen!), every time I see the completed stairs, I get a huge smile on my face, so it was 100% worth it.
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| Before & After |
I'll quickly walk through the steps, but I'd recommend checking out any of the above blogs for detailed instructions:
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| Step 0. Hang plastic to keep the mess somewhat contained |
- Sand -- what a mess it made! Luckily, since I was painting the risers, I really only had to thoroughly sand the tops of the stairs. Lightly sanded the risers and sides so the paint would adhere.
- Strip -- Getting the stain off the little nooks and crannies with Citrustrip.
- Sand again -- More mess
- Stain tops of steps, doing every other step, so we could still access our bedroom, which is upstairs. Carrying Kairo up and down when a fresh coat was applied right before bed was fun.
- Dry. Stain other half of steps.
- Dry. Apply polyurethane to tops of half the stairs. Luckily, I bought the kind for floors, which only recommended two coats.
- Dry. Reapply.
- Apply poly to other half of the stairs. Dry. Reapply. Are you getting that it's a very lengthy stinky process... the fumes.
- Allow poly to cure per instructions.
- Tape off freshly stained tops, so they don't get white on them. Oh, the taping! I hate the taping. With a passion.
- Apply primer to risers and sides and spindles.
- Dry. Apply paint to risers sides and spindles.
- Dry. Apply second coat of paint to risers, sides, and spindles.
- Remove tape and notice where the tape failed you.
- Fix where tape failed you -- still in progress in some areas... (guilty)
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In Progress, every other step stained
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| Sticky notes so we knew which steps to step on. Sanding the railing. |
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| See what I mean about this being such a drastic improvement?!?! |
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| Ahhh, love it! |
And as I was going through pictures for this post, I ran into this fun picture from the beach with my family. We were in the Outer Banks for Memorial Day last year, right before our floors were installed.
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| Kairo and my beautiful niece Ally on my lap. |
<3
K$
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