Adventure #242

We got the stairs painted. We got the stairs painted. (That is my happy song.) The walls around the stairs were where I was most anxious to fix up. Here are just a few reminders of how the stairs looked on the first day I laid eyes on our new home.

So. Here is what we did. The banisters came down early, since one extended down into the main living area, as you can see in the first picture. Then, I patched the holes with mud. I also did some sanding of holes the previous home owners had tried to fix. Much to my surprise there were no holes under the spackle. Some had black marks underneath but most had nothing, there was a heart drawn on the wall under one. Oh. Precious. After, I made a naive attempt to clean the top of the walls that had been used as a hand rail. You can see the dirt and hand grease in the second picture above. The shadow on the slanted wall is not a shadow. I say naive attempt because the previous home owners had tried to clean the walls with bleach. Ha. They did a stellar job as evidenced by the still dirty walls and bleach stains on the carpet. Note the yellow spots in the picture below.  

Blerg. The carpet on the stairs is not even salvageable. (I am temped to rip it out everyday.) I also could not wait to get my hands on this patch of dry wall, which was the worst area in the whole house. I think it cleaned up nicely.

   As you can see we decided to extend the grey paint we used on the main floor up the wall of the stairs. But first, I painted the baseboards and Matt painted the ceiling. Matt's job was easier said than done because we did not have a tall enough ladder. His solution was to place our little ladder on the ledge of drywall in the middle of the stairs, so he could take down heater vents and tape off ceiling lights. This worked really well, however I prayed the whole time that his weight would not break through the drywall. The worst part was when he decided to straddle the stairs with one foot on the wall ledge and the other on the lip of the windowsill to remove the blinds. Thankfully no Matts were injured during this project. Here are a couple of pictures from right before all this crazy went down.

  Then, a new short ladder problem. How do we get tape on the ceiling over the stairs, to make a straight edge between the wall and ceiling? Well Matt used our painting extension pole to push the tape onto the ceiling while I held the long ribbon of tape. Not perfect, but it worked. Finally, we painted. 

Alright, before you say, "Wait, Elise. Where did that big ladder come from sitting in the middle of your stairs?" Well, we bought it after painting. I know. I know. We like to do things the hard way. We thought many times of investing in a taller ladder, however we can do simple math so we knew a ten foot ladder would not fit in our little Yaris. I even thought of walking a ladder home since Home Depot is only a couple miles away. I cannot talk Matt into renting one of Home Depot's trucks either. Anyway, he decided that the edges are not straight enough from our rough tape job, so he found and bought a ladder that shrinks down to four feet. And that is where the ladder came from. So after all of that, look at our sweet newly painted walls.