Projects: The Stairs

As you may know my hubby and I are the king and queen of projects, especially the at home kind. I'm just not happy with buying something, I want to make it. I like being crafty and the challenge as well as I'm thrifty. My husband is the same way. He loves playing in the garage and working with all of his fancy, schmancy power tools. Likewise, we have a list of projects to do at any given time.

Seeing as how my hubby starts grad school tonight I was wanting to get as many projects done as possible, but there are still several on the list, big ones at that.

I was coming home from a morning meeting of my sorority alumni, enjoying the beautiful weather, and thinking that it would be a great day for a nice long bike ride on a trail near our house. So, I called my hubby.
Me: What are you doing?
J: Oh, a little research.
Me: Research, on what?
J: Oh, you'll see.

So I drive on home thinking that he's online and has found something he just has to have, or just has to do, or would like to do, etc. But I arrive home to find that he's taking the carpet off of the stairs. The "research" was seeing how hard that would be and what exactly was under there. Thus we launched full force into a large project on our list which was redoing the stairs.

We had what we like to call "church carpet" on our stairs, a very cheap, economy carpet stuff. It was not at all attractive and was a major pain to vacuum yet seemed to hold on to every speck or dust and dirt. Out goal was to put down hardwood treads.

Now although I didn't get to go on a bike ride that day, I was pretty excited to start our project. We'd planned on doing it since buying our house and had saved up for it. I suppose this weekend was as good a time as any.

My husband (who is very good at demolition has been taking apart the whole staircase and checking out everything underneath, presumably for fun. We've stained (and stained and stained) and polyurethaned (and polyurethaned and polyurethaned) the treads and are nearly in NA from inhaling all of the chemicals. We also painted the risers.

It's an ongoing project of doing a little every night this week until the big installation this weekend. I have JLK stuff all day Saturday and have a sneaking suspicion that my husband will not have patience to wait for my assistance until Saturday afternoon.