Stepping it up

Every time I get back on a blog kick, I realize the many things that I never took the time to post.  This is particularly evident if you look at the House Tour page, which still sports a healthy number of "coming soon" lines in regards to the current photos.  Actually, many of the "current" photos make me cringe, too, because we've come a long way from there.  Now that I've resolved myself that the blog is more for us to remember than for any external audience (although you guys are great, too!), I wanted to make sure things are a bit more up to date.

I'm going to start stepping up my act with...the stairwell.  As renovations go, it wasn't that exciting.  There's not a whole lot you can do with stairs (particularly steep, narrow ones like ours), and there's not furnishings or even a lot of decor to put in the "after."

Here's how it looked when we bought the house:

Then I got the brilliant idea that we should refinish the wood stairs instead of redoing the carpet.  I owe my sister big time for the amount of time she spent scraping those steps.

Eventually, I came to my senses, and we had it carpeted along with the rest of the upstairs.  We painted the walls & ceilings and painted the hand rail.  Some of the paint is chipping on the railing, so I'd like to redo it in some of the darker brown we have left from the front door.  When I originally did it, I used the chocolate brown from the den, as I didn't find it worth buying new paint for such a small job!

Given Anna's super-rolling talents, we now also have a gate at the top of the stairs.  I'm very happy with it thus far, as you don't need a mechanical engineering degree to get it open, and there's no bar at the bottom to make you trip.

The picture at the bottom of the stairs says "My home will have no windows, doors, or floors, nor bricks or mortar.  My only home is in your arms and no where else."

In other stair news, as I mentioned I'm working (when not derailed by leaking ceilings) on finishing the basement stairwell to make it less ugly and a bit more functional.  Here's how it looked when we moved in - and it's not much different now (except that there's a bunch of our stuff haphazardly stuck there!)

Stay tuned for that update...