I DID IT!

 I GOT ALL OF MY BALUSTERS INSTALLED TODAY!!! YAHOO! :)

(Special thanks to my sweet brother in-law for loaning me his finish nailer! xoxo!)

IT'S HERE!!

That's right! Baluster installation day has arrived! I had to take a break after installing the first one to make this post—the anxiety over starting the project and the excitement of getting one installed was driving me crazy! Now on to #4...

Baluster #2 is in! Here's #4 lined up and waiting to be marked for cutting!

Back to Work!

AT LAST! I finally have time to work on my house again!

Today I started by putting another coat of paint on my front door. After it dried, I pulled the contact paper off of the glass. When we first moved in here years ago, I put contact paper on the glass to keep people outside from being able to see inside; the contact paper provides a frosted glass type of effect. I am still concerned about privacy and plan on putting up some window tint instead.

In the process of removing contact paper. Note the difference between the panes; the far left one still has contact paper on it, whereas the other three have been stripped. 

Sometimes the afternoon sun really comes beating in the front windows, so we really need a way to block out the light, especially for TV viewing. I have admired my neighbor's bamboo window treatment for quite some time and thought I'd do something similar to my door.

This window treatment was just the right width! The length is a bit much though; 72" instead of the 45" I truly need. I am going to shorten it so it's not so bulky! I think I can do this by trimming this to the desired length and folding the raw edge under with a glue gun; kinda looks like that's what the manufacturer did.

Once I got that done, I turned my attention to the staircase again. I started this project yesterday by removing the remaining balusters. Then I sanded the treads and underside of the railing where the old balusters had been.

I brought the balusters in from the porch. Here they are, lined up like little soldiers. Number five gives me a hard time... doesn't want to stand up very well. Soon he won't have a choice!

Here's my youngin' (aka "Big Goonie") counting the balusters, making sure everyone is accounted for.

After many weeks of indecisiveness, I finally decided to paint the railing. Here it is in a brown color that is just slightly lighter and more caramel colored than my dresser I painted earlier this summer.

Remember, brown photographs weird...

This morning I applied the same glazing technique to the railing that I did to my dresser project.

Shot without flash to try to give a better idea of what this actually looks like. Regardless, brown is still difficult to photograph.

Once my railing paint is dry I will need to seal it with a poly-urethane coating so the glazing won't rub off with repeated touching of hands using the railing. After that I think we'll be ready to start fitting and nailing balusters! Check back soon!

Stain & Pain

I've been looking at stain choices for the flooring. I'd really like to go a little darker than what we currently have. Here I have sampled Dark Walnut (on the left) and Provincial (on the right) by MinWax.

Shot with flash

Shot without flash

It's weird how it looks so different with and without flash. I'm leaning toward the Dark Walnut. In person the Provincial looks similar to what we have currently and I'd really like a change! I am planning to water-pop the treads to enrich the color.


In other project news, I have finally completed finish coating the balusters. I had to paint THREE finish coats on them for complete coverage. Despite having primed them with Kilz stain-sealer, I still had some bleed through of the original color/stain.


I haven't worked on the house much in the last ten days—I don't like to work on my projects when my kid and husband are home, and my carpal tunnel has really been giving me fits! Hoping to get in the mood to make progress tomorrow...

Squeak No More!

Today I focused on silencing my staircase. Many of the treads are quite noisy when going up and down, and I thought I'd address the ruckus before I get started on refinishing them.

In researching how to deal with my problem, I found something cool on the internet called the Squeeeeek No More system. It comes with some jigs that countersink special screws into your flooring to eliminate squeaks. It works with linoleum, carpeted, and hardwood floors.

Here I am silencing a noisy tread!

The kit is available online, including at the manufacturer's website and Amazon.com, however I found mine at Lowe's in the hardwood flooring department for about $20. The manufacturer's website also has a few demonstration videos that illustrate how to address squeaks in the different floor coverings. Check em' out!

**UPDATE! Hubby noticed that the stairs no longer squeaked to which he commented, "I always kind of felt like the squeaky stairs gave our house character!" Alas, I guess our house has no longer has any character.

Continued Progress!

I've continued to make progress on my project. I painted the walls I've been working on with a flat finish coat, and have continued chipping away at paint around doors, baseboards, and stair risers.

Here you can see I just have four more risers to go! I am really pleased with how the skirting on the wall is looking too.

Unfortunately my carpal tunnel affliction isn't letting me work on this as much and as aggressively as I'd like. I am hoping to get some primer on these stripped risers this week!


**UPDATE! I bought one final can of that spray on texture I told you about, hoping that the first two I'd gotten were just duds. With this final can, I shook it FOREVER and ran it under some hot water for about 30 seconds or so. At last I was able to get the product to perform the way it was supposed to and actually managed to spray the entire contents onto my walls! I am beyond pleased with the results. It gave me exactly the look I was going for!

Hot Mess Tuesday

As always, I have my fingers in a few simultaneous messes today. Let me show you what I'm up to!

First we'll start with the stairs. I've continued to scrape them and get the skirting cleaned up as well. My husband has been pretty good about the destruction and messes I've been making lately. Wonder how he'll handle seeing the stairway with missing spindles? It's a necessary evil—I need to scrape the underside of the railing before I can put my new spindles in.

And speaking of spindles, I have another finish coat of paint to put on them. Here they are with one coat of primer and one coat of finish. Looking good!

I sat on the floor of my screened porch and painted the spindles while my little one sat on the other side of the door jabbering and making this hot mess. And to think she told me she was making SOUP! lol...

Here is a candlestick lamp that I am refinishing today as well. I am stoopid* and didn't make a before picture. It was cream with a crackle finish. The brown will fit my decor much better. Maybe I'll be bright enough to take an after shot when it's done...

*intentional misspelling to further illustrate my point

And lastly, this final hot mess was the inspiration for today's blog title. Let me explain...


You may recall that when I stripped the wallpaper off the other day, I had some wall damage that needed repaired prior to painting. In repairing the wall, the wall's texture was smoothed. I like my house's rough walls! I didn't want to go to the trouble of getting paint and adding sand, so I thought I'd just get a can of wall/ceiling texture and dial down the spray to a fine mist. If needed, I'll sand the texture down a bit prior to painting.

Here's a shot of what I was able to get done before my can of texture malfunctioned after just a couple of squirts:

Definitely one hot mess! At least, I'm assuming this mess is a malfunction? Anyone??

Now where's my receipt?! This thing's going back! Grr...

Busy, Busy, ...Decisions, Decisions!

Been busy these last couple of days. Yesterday I started scraping one of the doors that leads to the outside. It resembled this door when I started:

Now it looks like this (pardon the tools and my mess!):

I was impressed with how clean it came with just my putty knife and my paint scraper. My neighbor has her doors stripped (with white trim) and I really like the look. I am tempted to have just my two doors that lead to the exterior stained similarly to my neighbor's, but have all of my other doors in the house be painted white (as they currently are). What do you think?

You can see below that I have made some progress on the stairs as well. The skirting is scraping clean better than I expected (where the phone line used to be tacked), and I am almost done scraping all of the risers. You can see that I have also been busy filling nail holes on the risers. Maybe I'll sand and prime those tomorrow.

Today I started off my day by applying the glazing finish to the top of my dresser. I really love how this is turning out! When you look at it up close, it almost seems to resemble woodgrain. You can see I still need to apply the glaze to the vertical surfaces:

Once that was done I primed and painted the newel post in Ultra White. All of my home's doors and trim are currently painted a soft ivory color. I want a fresh clean look, so I am planning on repainting ALL of the woodwork in Ultra White. I think the white trim will make my wall colors look more vibrant and fresh. I'll put a second finish coat on the newel post tomorrow.

I will eventually paint the lower portion of the newel post—need to scrape and prime the quarter-round at the carpet, but this would be much easier to do if the carpet wasn't there. So I'm still working out a plan for this—I'm not quite ready to rip up all of my carpet, but might consider ripping up the perimeter and carpet tack strips so that I can scrape my woodwork throughout the room that's currently embedded in the rug.

And lastly, today I scraped paint off my baseboards and removed layers of painted wallpaper from a small wall. I plan on replacing this purple color with the cream color on the walls in the stairwell. My home has plaster walls and I'll have to do a little bit of wall repair before I'll be ready for paint here.

I'm still pretty stoked about finding those balusters yesterday! They had exactly how many I needed in the sizes I needed and I really like the detail in them—and I got them for a heck of a price! I think I'll paint them white. Such a shame to do since they're lightly stained now and would probably look equally nice with a darker stained finish like I want to use (I love woodgrain!), but I think the contrast of having white balusters with stained treads and railing will look nicer.

Guess we'll see what projects tomorrow brings!

SUCCESS!!

I found turned balusters today! Now the question is, should I stain them or paint them?

The Grand Staircase

I finally began renovating my staircase this week. I ripped up the carpet that was on them a year or so ago and have been putting off painting the woodwork and refinishing the treads. Our woodwork has many layers of paint on it and I have been putting off painting it as I decided how much effort I wanted to put into the project (ie., stripping it or just painting yet another layer on it). I have decided that some woodwork will get more attention than others.

I started with the newel post. It appears that at one time it had been stained and sealed, but when it was painted, it was painted with latex paint (which doesn't adhere well to oil-based finishes), so in many spots the paint came off in large pieces. In fact, I was using my shop vac to clean as I went, and often times the vac could pull the paint up itself. VERY COOL.

I'm going to paint the newel post and the balusters ultra white, but stain the handrail. I'd really like to replace the balusters with turned ones. Got a couple of building salvage places in nearby towns to check out in hopes that I can get used ones for a decent price. I need 30 of them.

Managed to get the newel post stripped in a day. The railing was done the following day. Making good progress!

I have started to focus on scraping my risers. There doesn't seem to be many layers of paint on them, so I'm just evening it out—sanding it down after some scraping—and going to prime over it. I also have a lot of hole filling to do from where I removed nails that held the carpet to the risers.

I am going to refinish the treads myself. I read that it can cost $45-65 A TREAD to hire someone to do them. I'm too cheap for that. I bought an orbital sander and plan on starting that project soon. I want to get my paint scraping done first though. After I've refinished the stairs, I'll assess how badly I want to refinish the other hardwood floors myself. To hire it out would cost about $1-3 a square foot. I am sure I can do it myself, just a matter of how badly do I want to? We'll see...

Prepping the skirting for paint will take me some time to do. There used to be a phone line tacked to the board that was then painted over many times. Consequently, the woodwork looks terrible where the phone line was. This part is going to be tedious! But it will be well worth it.

Also, a couple of the treads have cracks along the grain. I've been doing some research on how to address that issue. It will take some time for me to do, I think. Also, virtually every one of my steps is noisy as can be so I am planning on screwing/countersinking them down to the risers so the wood won't rub on the nails. Lots of prep work to do! I'm looking forward to seeing the finished project!