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.