We’ve been putting every spare moment to work around here lately –  painting, nailing, sawing, and caulking.  We are walking a perilous line between house project elation and house project burnout, but the satisfaction I get from seeing all the changes is worth it.  In my last post I showed you some progress we’d made in our upstairs:

The fresh white walls and new subfloor were already a big upgrade from the dirty carpet and urine-hued walls, but we’ve made a lot of progress since then.  Here’s where we’re at now:

I’m so excited!  (And also sore and a little tired).  Look at the way the floor just keeps going into the Chamber!  It’s like it’s all part of the same house or something!

The closed door leads to our bedroom – which is not yet part of the same house, alas.

While I never once considered that the slate floor of the bathroom would relate nicely to the charcoal of the stairs, I’m glad it does!

Sorry the photos aren’t great (low light has been the name of the game around Eugene lately).

We’ve still got some trim work to finish up, but it feels like the lion’s share of the work is done.  Painting the stairs didn’t end up being too hard, though it did require a fair amount of pre-planning.  Pro-tip: make sure to put the lid of the paint can at the bottom of the stairs, so when you’ve painted yourself down there you have it.

To prep the stairs, I hand scraped and sanded them to get the overspray from the wall texture off, then I filled the most egregious (splinter-edged) holes with wood filler. The stairs are old and worn-in and I don’t mind that, so I didn’t fuss about filling everything.

To paint, I started at the top 🙂 and had with me a dustpan and broom, a damp cloth, and a microfiber cloth.  I made sure each step was clean as can be before painting.  Because the stairs are a mix of plywood and hardwood, some of it painted, I did a coat of dark-tinted primer first.  I had floor and porch paint color-matched with Benjamin Moore’s ‘Raccoon Fur,’ which is the prettiest shade of charcoal with some blue-green undertones.

Don’t worry about those paint splatters near the wall; they’ll be covered by trim soon enough!

You might remember that I was worried about keeping Fat Bunny at bay, but it ended up being simple.  I just painted down to the lower landing and shut the door, then waited until he’d entered his daily 10-hour torpor to do the bottom few steps.

I’m so happy with the way it looks! There’s a fair amount of finish work still to do, but I dare say we’re well on our way to the British farmhouse aesthetic that I aspire to.

Thanks for reading!  Have a great week!