More Hardwood, More Problems

All we wanted to do was remove a little more carpet. The first time we did this it seemed so easy. It's not like a bedroom should be any different than the hallway and stairs, right? Wrong!

The hallway was similar to the bedroom in terms of the amount of work. We removed the carpet and all the staples. Then we had the amazingly tedious task of removing the tack strips. When we started to remove the carpet on the stairs our project to do list started growing rapidly. The first thing we noticed was that the stairs only had poly urethane along the edges...it appears that the last owners had a runner and decided not to finish underneath it.  Then we noticed that the risers were not fully painted...again only where it could be seen with the runner down. Also parts of the trim were painted. Ok, so first we had to figure out our game plan. The goal is to have beautiful oak treads that are stained a color that looks nice with the existing hardwood and to have the risers painted white to match the trim. After some investigative work we decided that we liked the look of the trim painted to match the risers...this made our job slightly easier because they were already painted on the edges. 

Step one was to sand the treads down to the natural wood in preparation for the stain. This part was way harder than we thought. Thank goodness for Steve's determination and hard work because I gave up on this project several times and then was fired...good call Steve!  Sanding is not my cup of tea. So, three days and a layer of dust later the stairs were prepped. On to step two, the stain. Luckily this part was easy. We had picked out a nice light stain called golden oak which was in between the upstairs and downstairs floor color. It went on nicely and we were happy with the results. We're currently in the process of putting the first coat of poly urethane on. We decided on a satin finish. We will put on three total coats before we're done.  Here are some before and in process pictures for now. I'll be back with the after photos in a couple of days. 

Although this project has been a bit stressful, I'm proud of the results and our ability to figure this out. We would not have had the confidence to tackle a project like this a year ago...success!