Refinishing the Basement Stairs

When Chris told me he would get three weeks paternity leave when Ivy was born, I had a feeling this could spell trouble. While it was great having him home so long, I haven't seen him sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time during our 5+ years of marriage (except when he sleeps through the BBC Pride & Prejudice, which I believe every husband should be required to watch once a year).

Well, it turns out my suspicions were correct! The day after we brought home our newborn, our house rung out with the sounds of random orbital sanding and nail gunning. He had decided to attack our gross basement stairs, which run off the kitchen.

During our kitchen remodel, our nasty old water-damaged kitchen floor was replaced with new hardwoods. The new boards stop under the basement door, and from that point on the floor is covered with original, very roughed-up hardwoods that were painted white at some point.

Before: gross stairs and landing.

Public service announcement: White painted floors do not wear well, and look dirty all the time.

Ok, back to business here. So, from the kitchen door there are three steps down to a landing, where the stairs turn and continue down to the basement. Chris decided to tackle from the kitchen door to the landing, as this portion of the stairs is actually visible from the kitchen when we open the door. We'll probably get to the remaining stairs someday, but they're much less of a priority.

Based on our usual mindset that we like to reuse materials whenever it makes sense, the original plan was to refinish flooring by the kitchen door and on the landing, and replace the old stair treads with new ones. However, as Chris got the boards stripped and sanded, the boards at the top of the steps were pretty rough underneath.

The old, stripped boards just can't keep up with the pretty kitchen floor.

These beaten up, gaping boards looks especially bad next to the kitchen floorboards, which were installed and finished just two years ago. Fortunately, we had just enough board left over from the remodel to replace board in the area, which looked much better. He purchased a few new red oak treads at our local home improvement store and replaced the three stair treads, and stuck with our original plan to strip and sand down the original oak floorboards on the landing to prepare these boards to be restained and finished.

The newly installed floorboards blend into the kitchen flooring. 

Old stair treads are removed (giving a lovely view of the water heater) and Chris sized new treads prior to installing.

Chris is a big fan of Citristrip - a non toxic and minimally stinky way to remove gooey paint. He paints it on, lets it sit overnight and scrapes it off with a putty knife.

The project drug on a while because we needed access to the basement from time to time, so he could not just keep applying stain and polyurethane over and over. We had to take the occasional break between coats to do laundry and get groceries from our deep freeze, so this really was a great project to tackle while we were both home from work.

Plus, we figured while we had the area all torn up, we needed to do some work to the trim and walls in order to really get full payoff for the hard work. Chris capped the existing baseboards for a more finished look, and installed new shoe molding. We caulked and painted all the trim, and I painted the walls using leftover Sherwin Williams Dorian Gray from Ivy's nursery.

Once the work was all done, the area was quickly transformed.

   

The old trim got a major facelift with some sanding and caulking, and a new cap piece attached.

The landing flooring is a bit more rustic than the rest of our wood floors, but we decided we are good with that and chose not to replace all the floorboards. We'll look for a nice doormat to put inside the door anyway, which will cover all that you see from the kitchen. And while distressed looking, the boards are perfectly smooth underfoot - which is the most important part for us!

While some may find it strange to invest this much time in basement stairs, we are thrilled with the improvement! Even if no one sees it but us we feel it was a very worthwhile effort, improving an area that we use every day for very little cost.

Switchplate Swap

Chris and I have found that some of the most satisfying upgrades in a home come from upgrading small details throughout the house. When we moved in the majority of our light switches and outlets were white or off white plastic, builder grade materials like this.

While there's nothing really wrong with these fixtures, they just didn't do much for us, and in an old house with original brass and iron hardware everywhere (for hinges, doorknobs, heating grates, etc.) white plastic on every wall just seemed wrong.

So, we started upgrading them one room at a time, replacing all the plastic plates with these metal ones. Each plate costs around $6, so total cost per room was anywhere from $18 (for our guest rooms with one switch and two outlets) to around $40 for our living room.

When we worked on our first few rooms, we went to the trouble of actually replacing the outlets and switches themselves with brown fixtures to match the new plates, which required us to turn off electricity in our basement, disconnect the old part and wire in the new one. This added around 10-20 minutes (depending on how long it took us to locate the correct breaker) and a few dollars per outlet - not a huge cost or time investment, but it did add up over time.

After a few rooms were completed, we wised up. We had some spray paint on hand from another project, and decided to just see how it went to paint the old fixture rather than replace it. We were both thrilled with the result. It looks exactly as good as purchasing the new part, and provided a great time savings - and spared a few bucks too!

That time and money savings added up. Each outlet took about 5 minutes to prep and paint, and for every 2-3 outlets we painted rather than purchased new parts, we could buy one extra plate!

Here's the process. Note - ignore the crazy paint color changes. I painted this outlet while painting the walls in our nursery, and we went through several color variations before landing on the grey we liked in the end.

Outlet with old switch plate removed.

Paper grocery bags were perfect for prep. We hung the large side on the wall with a rectangle cut out, and folded up pieces of the handles to plug the outlet holes. We opted not to turn off the electricity, and just be careful - but you could do it either way. 

Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint applied.

One coat was enough - and with a drying time of only 30 minutes we were able to move through with little or no wait.

And after! 

Another angle. These photos were actually taken about six months later, so you can see what they look like with some wear. 

We used the same process for light switches (only with a smaller opening for the garbage sack, and no holes to fill).

The nursery was actually our last room to upgrade - we had done the light switch but since both outlets were behind furniture when it was our guest room, we kind of forgot just never got to them. And five years in, we're still very happy with this little upgrade. While we realize that probably no one else even thinks twice about them, we use them numerous times every day and think they were worth a little work.

Are there any seemingly small details like this in your house, that you've decided are too important not to invest in? Or any "standard" building materials you don't care for in your space?

Nursery Decorating Chapter 1: Sometimes Progress Isn't Pretty

 For the past several months, our nursery has looked something like this.

Very soon after finding out I was pregnant and (before we were even telling people), we came across this crib for sale on Craigslist. I knew I wanted a Jenny Lind style spindle crib in dark wood, and this one, which was only two years old, was an amazing deal at only $60. So we removed our old guest bed and moved in the crib.

Then, in May after my grandfather passed away, were were in his hometown of Perry, Iowa for the funeral, and happened upon a wonderful little antique store. We purchased the rocker, whose arms you can just see in the bottom right corner of the photo. More photos of him to come, but with this purchase we had all the furniture pieces selected for the room - crib, wide dresser, old living room chaise (bottom left) rocker and tall dresser (which can't be see but is next to the rocker). We figured out the general furniture layout we liked and things have sat since then.

Until last week! I decided it was time to attack. Chris was planning on being out of town for the weekend, so I called in some help in the form of my sister and her six-year-old daughter Annabel to get some painting going. Before we could get started though, I had some prep to do.

Chris and I weighed the options of replacing baseboards in the room vs. refinishing them like we did in our own room two and a half years ago. While we like to preserve as much of the house's original materials as much as possible, we decided it made more sense to just start new with these boards for several reasons:

• They were ROUGH. I don't have photographic evidence, but believe me - these ones were in way worse shape than any of the other trim in the house.
• We would have to sand down a lot to get them paintable, risking scattering lead paint dust around our child's future room - not an idea we love.
• The aren't the "nice original wood" we love in the house. Don't get me wrong - fixed up they'll look like a million bucks, but they are low grade pine - not stain grade oak like we have on our main level.
• We can match the style in new boards for about $100 in materials - saving a lot of time and eliminating nearly all of the mess. 

So out the baseboards came! Painting without the baseboards meant that we wouldn't have to worry about edging the bottom of the wall (yay!) and that any damage done in removing them could be repaired prior to painting and putting the new boards in. They came out very easily - I did it by myself in about an hour.

After clearing out the room and purchasing some supplies, we were left with the below scene. See those scratches on the walls? Those are no accident. After I removed the baseboards, Chris and I took a paint scraper and sanding block to the walls to knock off some texture.

We love smooth walls, and while this step still left them far from perfectly smooth, it did take off some of the bumpier spots and goobly-goshes, as we call them. So yes - sometimes progress looks like this.  

Chris also did some light sanding on the window trim, so that it would be ready for a fresh coat of paint while we had the room apart. 

And one important piece to note - the closet in this room contains some of the very last of the original paint from when we moved into the house. That's right - it's crazy turquoise! And you can't tell in the photo, but it's also high gloss paint. If you every wanted to see your reflection in turquoise, this closet was the place to do it. 

I weighed grey paint options, and landed on Sherwin Williams Argos. But when I painted a test patch, it looked blue. And with our robin egg blue curtains, I immediately knew it wouldn't work. 

So Chris suggested I mix in some black paint we had on hand, from painting the back of our fireplace a few years back. Since this experiment would cost us exactly $0 and might make the paint I had purchased for the walls usable, I decided to give it a try. 

So I mixed it in and rolled our new and improved paint onto the walls. As it dried I brought in my fabrics, to test it out. And unfortunately while it was definitely darker, it was still more blue than grey, and clashed with my aqua curtains.

So I bit the bullet and selected new paint - this time Sherwin Williams Dorian Grey (4th down on the swatch). A quick errand and $45 later, we were ready to roll again. Pun intended. 

And while I was a bit bummed about the dollars wasted on my first paint color, it did still work as a first coat, so only one coat of our second grey was required to cover the walls. The photo above shows the difference between the colors - my darkened Argos above our final color of Dorian Grey on the bottom (with our old room color along the top trim - Sherwin Williams Baguette).

And so we painted. We're still re-assembling so more photos are coming soon with the final wall color and a few other updates we made while we were at it.

Oh, and about that closet. It benefited from some extremely enthusiastic child labor. Thanks, Annabel!