The Before and After of the Stairs / Wall

The Stairs that finally were

Some very exciting news folks, the stairs that seemed like the never ending job are finally completed! These wood spiral stairs were quite the eye sore for way too long.

Praise the lord!

Here is the finished product kids:

Prior to completion, the stairs looked like the photo below for a while as we slowly realized how impossible it would be to take the paint off.

It has probably been in various stages of this (as seen above) since April 2013. Partly because there were SO MANY layers of paints (literally there were at least 20 layers) and because it was such a pain in the arse to get the paint off. 

We tried various methods of getting the plethora of paint layers off. We first tried chemical removers but there were so many layers that it only took off a few layers per application.  Next was a clothes iron with a wet cloth underneath of it. We'd let the iron get hot then we'd put a wet cloth down on the treads and put the hot iron on top of it for a few minutes. The steam and heat worked very effectively at bubbling and loosening the paint off of the treads so we could scrape it off. So that method was pretty effective at removing most of the paint on the treads. 

But that still left us with the risers! Enter the heat gun. I could work for an hour and get a 1/4 of a stairs paint partially removed. Chris, that wild man, could work for the same amount of time and literally have like 2 or 3 stairs done. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call progress you can't argue with. 

What we found to be most effective was a heat gun and Chris' guns (muscles) = progress, as seen below:

Looks like someone had painted on a runner before on the stairs? Some people!


Here is a shot of what the stairs looked like with the paint (FINALLY) removed:

Glorious!

The next step was to sand them down with a belt sander. That produced a HUGE amount of dust. So we had to take the precautions of putting plastic sheets over the furniture etc. Once the stairs were sanded we could get to the final step in this journey - to paint the risers white and stain the treads! Hal-le-loo-ya!

So I came home the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving to very happily find the progress below! The risers were well on their way to being painted white but the staining had not yet commenced.

                                          

                                         


While Chris was busy with other jobs I took on the task of painting EVERYTHING white!

I even gave the basement door a fresh coat of shiny white paint!

The stairs really start to look swell once we got some stain on them:

Here is what is looks like currently with Christmas decorations and all:

Oh! Also we (and by we I mean Chris) finished patching up the gap in the ceiling left by the wall. 

This is what it looked liked before Chris patched it up:

     

Here it is looking all snappy :

We've gotta work on the photography end of things but you get the idea! Things are a-moving along.

I heart Chevron

We've had this coffee table for a while. For a long time we were using it as a TV stand, but then we mounted the TV on the wall and it became a coffee table. We got it for almost nothing when we first moved in and got the majority of our furniture off of craigslist. Because it was a piece of junk, so to speak, I felt comfortable experimenting on it. Muhahaha. 

Below is a picture of the table in its plain form before I got my creepy fingers on it. 

I ruminated on what I wanted to do to this table for quite some time. Spent time on pinterest looking at DIY coffee tables and googling images of painted coffee tables etc. I knew I wanted to paint it white then put some kind of pattern on top. My initial inclination was to do chevron because I love chevron and I have experience doing chevron. As seen below in another craft of mine:

But I hemmed and hawed and even considered doing a stencil. But finally I just bit the bullet and decided chevron was the way to go. 

First step was to take the coffee table in the back and sand it down!

I sanded it down so that the paint would have something to grip to. The table previously had a coat of shinny stuff on it which would have made the paint slip right off. 

The next step was to paint it in several coats of glossy white. 

Here is the table in it plain white form while I ruminated on what design to paint it. 

You can sort of see in this photo below how I went about doing the chevron pattern. I first taped off the borders so there would be a nice trim to it. Then I made a cross weave with the painters tape. To make sure the tape was spaced properly I used a piece of wood we had laying around that was the proper size. I should have taken more pictures of this process but I always forget while in the heat of doing these things! Below is the piece of wood I used and also the right angle tool that I used initially to make sure the cross hatch was on a right angle. 

You kind of get the idea, right? Once the cross hatch was done I had to, quite paint painstakingly I might add, go back and remove the tape in between in the right places to make the chevron pattern come out right. I had to use an exacto-knife and go over the boarders of where I wanted to remove the tape, then ever so carefully remove it. 

Here is what it looked like once I was done cutting the cross section parts off:

It looks like border got funky there but really I put a few more coats of white on top when the boarder was partially on and the white paint got on the border. If you look closely you will see that it is just white paint on top of the painters tape. 

So the next step was to color in between the lines! To accomplish this I used a foam roller and rolled the paint in one direction. Again, I wish I had photo to document this, but I did not. 

I decided to use the same paint that we had painted the walls with. Which was "Smokey Taupe" by Benjamin Moore. I didn't want to use the purple that we painted the chairs with because I wanted the chevron pattern to be subtle and not hit you in the face when you walked in the room. 

I had to paint the smokey taupe over the glossy paint several times to get it to adhere well. Once I painted several coats and I was satisfied with the uniformity of the finish, and the paint was dry, I pealed the tape off. There was some slight bleed through with I went back and cleaned up with the white paint with this flat edged foam brush:

Here is what it looked like after I did some edge work and prior to me putting the clear acrylic sealer on the table:

I snatched up a clear acrylic sealer from Michaels on clearance when I was there for god knows what reason. Here it is below:

I took the table in the back outside once again and put several coats of this bad boy on. The label says to let it dry for 15 minutes in between coats but I let probably an hour pass in between coats just to make sure it was good and dry. 

Here is the table once the acrylic dried:

And here is a montage of the process:

Gotta love montages!

Sexy Chocolate

It has been a whiles since I've updated but a lot of things have been happening around here!

We decided we should re-stain the first floor. We came to this conclusion for a few reasons. One reason was to protect the floor from damage. We've been here 4 years now and I don't really have any before pictures but I feel like the floor has taken a beating. We reasoned the best thing to do is add a coat of stain to it!

The most compelling reason was ever since we have taken down the wall there was a big stain disparity where the wall had been. Where the wall had formerly occupied space the floor was not stained. We tried to stain it to match the existing floor, but no dice :/ It just looked weird and half arsed. Which is not uncommon with us!

Weirdness seen (sort of) in the picture below:

So commenced Operation: Stain the Main Floor!

We decided that'd we stain the floor piece meal. It was not feasible to move all of the furniture out to stain the whole floor in one foul swoop. We decided to do the back section first then the front section. So we took on the highly advanced method of moving all our sh*t to front in as non messy a way as possible.

Our stuff in the front piled up:

Let us get into the nitty gritty details of how we stained the floor. We opted to not sand the floor down because we did not want to deal with the dust it would kick up. We also felt like we could skip the sanding step and it would be just fine because we were not staining it a different color than it already was. We were indeed correct!

We used the stain and poly in one below:

We decided that Chris would do the edge work and I would do the roller to get more area done. He is better with details and I am better with broad strokes so we divided the work up accordingly. So here are some of the photos of us, actually just him in action since I was taking the pics! We only commenced this work once we moved everything, vacuumed thoroughly and swiffer wet-mopped the floor a few times.

Here is Chris doing the edges:

       

It looks like I'm not doing anything right? Well I actually just stain rolled the whole right side of the floor there!

So here is the completed back side of the room. Looks like sexy chocolate, doesn't it?

And now for some front side pics:

We had to leave a small walking path to the front door so we could get in and out of the house (unfortunately we have to leave sometimes). Once the rest of the front floor dried we could stain the walking path and still be able to get to the door to leave without stepping on wet stain. It took some brain power but we did it! The walking path is pictured below in the first pic:

 

                                     


Now with the furniture back and Chris enjoying the sights:

                         



I also forgot to mention another reason for staining the floor. We recently upped our storage on the first floor with an Ikea Expidit 4x4 unit. We already had an Ikea Expedit 2x4 unit, so we came up with the space saving idea of putting the 2x4 on top of the 4x4. Essentially we "ikea-hacked" a 6x4 Expedit unit. Here is what it looks like:
                                        




Before letting it soak in I prematurely requested Crit to anchor it to the wall in the middle of the first floor. After we had lived with it in the middle of the room for a bit, I decided (much to Chris' dismay) that I wanted to move it! Having the huge 6x4 in the middle of the room cut the room off short, visually. We reasoned what was the point of knocking the wall down if you are going to visually make it a similar size to what it was with the wall up?

It is a bit of a hassle to un-anchor it from the wall and move it. We figured if we are going to take the effort to un-anchor it, it was an opportune time to re-stain the floor! Here is a pic of what is looked like before:

After we moved the Ikea Expedit and stained the floor:

The Ikea Expedit was right up against the light switch then we moved all the way to the left as far as we could. Oh and then we also moved this sweet free desk (someone had put it out to trash in our hood so we swooped in and picked it up) right next to it and put a collage of sorts above it. Pretty sweet looking if you ask me!

Chairs

So when Crit and I moved into the house he got the couch, dining room table and chairs for dirt cheap on craigs list. Chairs are shown below (left) and you have probably seen them in other posts. As you can tell, they suck. So we took on the project of sanding, painting and re-upholstering them. After heming and hawing about the paint color for a few months, the actual work part of this project probably took about a month. It was not too bad once we got it down to an assembly line like process. I sanded all the chairs first, then painted them, while Chris was using the staple gun to re-do the fabric. Pics are below, sorry they are so grainy.   

old vs new 

 head on view

chair on lazy susan contraption I made for painting

                                         

finished product with chairs at dining room table

chairs are used throughout the main room for various purposes 

Back alley update

So this is not exactly sexy or exciting but it is work on the house none-the-less and is therefore included in this fantastic little blog.
Chris was taking out the trash one day and suddenly found himself two feet shorter as he crashed through the ground and was knee deep in the concrete alley way. A pit had formed through a leak in the drainage pipe out back. It happened at an opportune time. It was the same time we were taking the wall down and had tons of bits and pieces that we couldn't be put out for trash removal because they're too heavy and the precious trash man cannot take away anything over 50lbs. So we used it to fill in the pit that had recently formed in our alley way. Hooray!
Chris poured the cement and everything himself. According to him there were approximately 1000lbs of crap from the wall removal, 800 lbs of stone (in addition to the wall material to fill the hole) and 1200 lbs of concrete to smooth over the pit. All this material was shipped from the Home Depot in the back of his Passat to the house in only 3 trips! Unfortunately I did not get any pics of him in action. Just take my word for it, it is not as easy as these photos portray :)

Before

After

Wall Progress update # 2

Hello party people!

So here is the update on how things are going with Operation: Take Wall Down.

So once the wall completely down and the wiring was done (see victory photo below).. 

construction progress on the "finishing details" could commence.

So Crit decided that the  "construction was shabby" on the first three stairs so he rebuilt them.

This shows the dry wall installed over the studs. 

Hand railing installed... stairs painted. I'm thinking about changing the treads to natural wood color and the painting the back things white...hmmm.

While Chris and his Pops were busy with the stairs and the electrical I got to painting the whole room one color... Smokey Taupe by Benjamin Moore. This color looks very similar to what was in the dining room but it is indeed not! The color in the dining room was like a real real light sea foam green and this Smokey Taupe color is like a real light grey. An excellent neutral :) So while they were working away I was painting the entire dining room as well as the living room because it'd look kind of funny the room were split with two colors, right? Right. 

Shot of the front door with the new wall color

                                  

Here are a few photos of the first furniture arrangement we had while the Christmas tree was up 

Shot of front door view from the kitchen with old furniture arrangement.

This is what we got going on now with the furniture. I think I like this better. What do you think?

Still to be done:

Ceilings patched up

Entire stair case repainted

Railings painted

Possibly exposing brick on left wall in photo above