before and after : stairs

I'm thinking hard about the direction of this little blog, which is why I've been posting so infrequently. In the meantime, here's a "little" project that I tackled at the end of 2010 and never got around to blogging about.

***

Once upon a time, my husband and I bought a dirty cat house. We worked on it hardcore for six months, moved in, and had our baby just two weeks later. At that point, the house was livable, and almost finished... but there were still projects galore, niggling at the back of my mind.

One of them was our staircase.

The kickplates had been painted white before we moved in, but the paint was cheap, watered-down latexy junk, and started peeling off almost instantly... revealing stinky, smelly stained wood underneath. Ick.

Here's the staircase, after I scraped the paint off:

Lovely.

To make this project more challenging, we had already had the flat part of the stairs refinished {that's the nice wood that you see}. Meaning, clumsy, splatter-painter-me would have to be extra careful...

I took a weekend, and painted. And painted. And painted. {Marty should get credit for this job, too. He watched a squirmy baby for almost 48 hours straight so that I could get this done...}

Here are a few more before pictures:



Notice the missing door in this one :)


And, here are the afters:




Much better, right?! {It only took me ten months to get around to it...}

If I keep this pace up, I'll finish my "to-do around the house" list in 3,027 years. Yippee!


{anyone have any tips on mustering up inspiration for finishing unfinished projects? I'd love to hear them! I've got a good one of my own: invite the whole neighborhood over for a Christmas party. It'll get any eye-sore projects in your house finished in no time!}