Stepping Up

One more look back: the stairs. When we bought the house, we thought that we'd just pull off the stained grey carpet and paint the stairs. Boy, were we wrong!

First we had to remove the "peel and stick" tiles, which ripped off the finish on the stairs, leaving a lumpy mess. Pulling up the dirty carpet seemed vile, until I spent about 45 hours stripping the layers of paint with a heat gun, and then with lovely scented paint stripper. How much of the paint was leaded, I wonder? And then painting with oil based paint. I did the second coat on Christmas day, before going to my sister's house for dinner. But it is funny how I had forgotten all the work, until I looked at these pictures.