Refresh, Back Stairs

Okay so maybe I didn’t actually need to fix a project that had already been completed once BUT honestly, the back stairs needed to be fixed from my fixings. You see I realized something as we were doing our top to bottom overhaul that I had still been “fixing” things like a renter would.

We had rented several historic properties over the years and always worked hard to improve them, but never the way you would with a property you owned. I realized that I was still doing that when I had refreshed our back stairs, I hadn’t really thought about what I was doing enough and I was anxious to see anything but that gross brown paint!

We had approached our top to bottom overhaul much differently and had taken our time with fixing up each room…so it left those back stairs glaringly blech. The paint was already looking bad and I didn’t like how I had used two shades of gray and was really over it all. We also needed to fix several things that I had overlooked to move the project along. We were going to paint the stairs differently than the color we had used throughout the upstairs but had leftover paint so waste not my friends…waste not. Also, we really love the color and thought, what’s wrong with a sea of grayish green? 

Here’s what we did (again) ::

• Painted the Ceiling (twice)
• Painted the Walls (twice)
• Patched the Holes in the Stairs
• Patched all the Cracks in the Walls, Floors and Molding
• Fixed Broken Step
• Hand sanded the Stairs & Cleaned them
• Painted the Stairs Undercoat
• Painted the Stairs Top Coat (twice)
• Changed the ceiling light (again)

We think they look terrific and the color is actually a bit darker because of hand brushing them, so we ended up having a difference there after all. Honestly, I am really glad we just got it over with and made it like I should have done the first time around. It takes time to learn ones home and we should have allowed that to really settle in our minds but we were both so anxious to get started. I am so glad we’re here now and even though we’ll be fixing our fixings in other rooms downstairs…it feels grand to have the upstairs 80% finished….there’s still a bathroom and our main landing to get to but we’ll get there.

This is what the back stairs looked like when we first moved in.

The first time we fixed them up.

How they looked when we first moved in (take 2).

When we first fixed them up (take 2).

Andrew fixing the top step which was falling apart.

The completed back stair refresh (for real this time).

The completed back stair refresh (take 2).