A December DIY Project

So, I've got lots of pictures from the work we did this break.  Those of you who've been to our house probably remember the wretched foyer.  You come in the front door, and are immediately forced into an up or down decision.  Down leads to the philosopher's study, and the laundry room, and storage, and the garage.  Up leads to the main floor of the house.  Both sets of stairs had cheap crappy carpet on them.  Like this:

 (looking down from the landing of the main floor)

You can see that the landing is really beat up.  What you *can't* see is how scratched and dinged the banister is.  Yuck.

So we stripped off the carpet, and ripped out the old, damaged hardwood.  We discovered the treads underneath the carpet were simply 2x10s.  Yeah.  Treads are supposed to be 11 inches deep.  ::sigh::

Over the course of two days I stained and polyurethaned all the new oak treads we purchased, and painted the new risers a lovely white to match the rest of our trim in the house.

THEN....

The philosopher pulled out his sledgehammer and proceeded to dismantle the whole shebang, right down to the stringers!

Oh.

Did I mention that this staircase is the only way to get to the basement without going out onto the back deck, walking around the outside of the house and coming in through the garage?  Yeah.  And did I mention that the storage room in the basement serves as our storage for most of our kitchen stuff?  Yeah.  And did I mention that the day we ripped out the stairs was cold and rainy?  So there was that.

But actually, we moved pretty quickly because we'd done so much prep in advance.  Just a few hours later we were here:

You'll notice the landing already looks better, right?  To give us a nice level floor we covered the old OSB with a sheet of luan plywood before topping it with a new laminate.

By bedtime we were finished - well, at least with the staircase. 

The banister?  Welllll...... that's another story.  It started when we removed the newel post and the half-newel and decided to sand them down and restain them.

Before                   and                  After

(If you look carefully at the after, doesn't the top look a little like the Eye of Sauron?  I hope that doesn't mean anything....)

And I have to say how proud I am of the philosopher.  We needed a stairnose to connect to the laminate for the down-stairs bit.  The stuff Pergo wanted to sell us was obscenely expensive, so G took a chunk of oak and routed a beautiful stairnose for the landing going down.  It looks better than the one we could have paid $60 bucks for!

If you zoom in, it's the bit right by G's arm, just at the edge.  So when you come up the stairs from the basement, you see this lovely bit that matches perfectly with the edges of all our new treads.  Yay for the philosopher handyman!

And here's a look up from the front door:

SHINY!!!!

Erm... what?  A handrail, you ask? 

Well... that's yet another story.  We actually have the handrail installed, but no shoerail (the part that attaches to the whiteboard) and no balusters.  That's because the big box store didn't get our special order shoerail in time.  It's supposed to come in today, but there's a day of staining before it can be installed, then a day of polying the whole mess, then another day of installing the lovely white balusters.

So I'm thinking y'all will get another post with the "after" pics.

How does Spring Break sound???