Staircase part 2- prepping for greatness

The initial demolition was rather satisfying. The next stage was a little tedious. What we are intending to achieve is a more open and light look and feel to this area. Since the staircase is the first thing you see when you walk in, we want it to be more of a focal point. When we built the house, we were struggling with the budget after the contractor forgot a little thing called TRUSSES. If you've ever built a house you know that is not something you just forget. That error put a $10,000 crimp on our budget and to reclaim the difference we sacrificed compromised on a lot of the finishing details, including the staircase. 


I've looked at a zillion images of staircases and think that the best fit for the architecture of this house will be a wood banister with white rails. I want to carpet the stairs because I feel it is safer than wood and most of the flooring in the house will be hard surface. It will be a way to bring in a softer surface on a lower traffic area. 


We had the option of following the angle of the staircase or notching the base at the level of each stair. We chose the latter, because we like the look and have a good idea how we want to trim it out. Installing the rails will likely be easier too. Building and reinforcing the base was not exactly complicated, but did require a fair amount of patience and many trips back and forth to cut 2x4's.

Once that was done, it was time to put the drywall back up.

See that ladder? This is where it goes:

Part of the compromise I mentioned earlier was that we did all the drywall ourselves in an effort to bring the budget back. Our savings in labor costs manifested in several areas where the seams were less than desirable. This was one- of course the highest, most difficult to reach spot in the entire house.


Once the mud was dry, it was time to paint. We started with the ceiling. One thing I wanted to change is the ceiling fan at the top of the stairs. It is too large for the space and it seems a little dated to me. I suggested we remove it now so that it would be easier to paint. Bye fan!

Together, we painted primer over the entire upper stair area. This was a little tricky and required some clever maneuvering of the ladder. And a broom handle.

The walls are all white now, the ceiling has been painted white semigloss. Next is painting the walls and installing a new fan, both of which need to be purchased. The lower hall needs a little more mudding attention and to be painted as well. Then we'll get to start on the really fun stuff- adding the woodwork and trimming the staircase out.

Upstairs, west bedroom

This bedroom is almost a mirror image of the east bedroom, with the exception of the closet. The other closet is a standard closet with a 5' opening. This room's closet is a triangular walk in closet located near the dormer instead of on the opposite wall. Because of the closet configuration, it is slightly larger.

Back in January, our oldest daughter received new bedding for her birthday. We bought a lot of accessories too, all in hot pink/black/white with zebra and leopard prints mixed in. It is a diva room! She wanted to keep that diva feel here and use as much as possible from her previous room. Her bed size will change from full to queen so we'll wait to see how the comforter fits, if it is too narrow we'll invest in a solid hot pink blanket or light comforter underneath that will extend down below her full sized comforter.

With the color scheme in mind, I asked her to think about a paint color that wouldn't compete, but serve as a neutral back drop to all of her bold colors and accessories. She chose Behr's Feather Gray for the walls and then borrowed the same Scented Valentine pink for her dormer as we used on the walls in her sister's room.

Hey, you can see the ozone generator in this image!

One thing that she did request was a graffiti wall. We discussed different options and then settled on creating a giant chalk board for her room.

We did this by purchasing a 4' x 8' piece of fiber board from Home Depot and painting it with chalk board paint. We decided to make it a magnetic board so we primed it with Rustoleum's Black Flat Magnetic Primer. One of my husband's co-workers had just completed a small project using Rustoleum's Chalk Board Paint and she gave us what was left so we didn't have to buy that.

The super smooth surface of the fiber board was perfect for this project. We screwed it to the wall then filled the screw holes with caulk. Once that dried we primed it with three thin coats of the magnetic primer. If you ever attempt to use this product let me suggest having it mixed at the paint counter before you leave. It is almost impossible to get completely blended at home, you'll be stirring for a good 15 minutes as the magnetic portion of the product settles to the bottom and is very heavy. To make the magnetic effect very strong, I think this would require more than three coats- at least five- but we used all that the can held and at $20 a quart I was not buying more. Once this had fully dried I painted it with two coats of chalkboard paint, again using all that remained in the can. It has a nice finish on it and will hold small magnets. I doubt it could hold anything heavier than a piece of paper, though, so it does have its limitations.

Once it was dry we used door trim to create a frame, nailing it directly to the wall. We caulked the nail holes and mitered corners and hit it with a final coat of white semi gloss. The frame makes the entire board look polished and it will be the perfect place for my daughter to do her graffiti. I'll try to remember to get a finished pic with the trim for you.

I told the girls we had to wait until H1 was sold before we'd be buying any accessories for H2. Then I saw this hot pink lamp for $10 at Walmart and knew it would be perfect so I ignored my own words and picked it up anyway.

Things left to do:
Had to replace a couple pieces of floor trim but got distracted with other projects so that needs to be finished. Also, the closet could really stand to be painted better. Its odd angles make it hard to get the corners but our sloppiness shows. Even though it is just a kids' closet, the time to make it right is now. I'm also painting the bed that will go in this room a distressed black. That has been started but not yet finished.

Upstairs, east bedroom

We started in the bedroom on the east side of the house for no better reason than when their dad asked the girls to come down and help on that particular day, only one of them did. The bedroom she wanted to be hers was the one where we started.

The carpet had been ripped up, but there were staples all over the floor. The tack board around the perimeter and floor trim needed to be pulled up as well. We saved the trim to reuse so all the nails had to be pulled from it. The blinds on the windows were cheap vinyl blinds that the cats had ruined (they had ruined every set of blinds in the house except one bathroom). The cats had also damaged the door jambs of all the doors upstairs too. This particular bedroom was very bad. We weren't sure if the doors would need to be replaced or if they could be repaired with wood filler. Since we happened to have some filler on hand, we tried that first. It required patience and letting several layers build up, but it worked and we discovered we'd be able to salvage all of the interior doors.

There was still a subtle odor from the cats so we wanted to be sure to use a primer with a vapor barrier. We did a fair amount of research and discovered that Zinsser oil-based primer seemed to be a favorite among the flippers on the internet boards. Since they steered me in the right direction with the ozone generator I was very happy to embrace the love and go with the popular primer.

Until we opened the can, anyway. Wow, them's some fumes! I couldn't hack it. Several times I started feeling light headed and dizzy and when I bent over one time I thought I was going to face plant into the floor. I bailed on the priming and sat outside for the rest of the night trying to make the world stop spinning. Ok, so by rest of the night I mean about an hour, but it was long enough for me to decide that we could not use that same primer throughout the entire house. Not to mention that cleaning up oil-based paint is a royal pain PITA. We opted for a latex primer after that for all of the walls and only used the oil-based primer on the floors to seal in any remaining cat odor.

We let the girls pick out their paint colors with minimal direction. My youngest loves green, all shades of green, and I fully expected her room to be green and purple with touches of yellow and pink in the accessories. To help the girls get a vision for their room, I took them to the how-to book section at Home Depot and flipped through a book on kids' rooms. I was so surprised when she picked out a room that was pink with orange and yellow. She also liked one that was purple, so we decided to paint the walls pink, the dormer walls purple, and then paint a desk and dresser in green.

The only difficult part of painting the upstairs rooms was the 9' ceilings. I simply can't reach, even on a small step stool. This meant much of the painting fell on my husband's shoulders. Sorry, guy!

After we painted ceilings and walls, we installed the flooring that the girls picked out. It is a laminate from Home Depot that was mid-range in quality but only $1.30 a square foot. We found that Big Lots seemed to have better quality underlayment for a cheaper price so we opted for that. The flooring went down pretty quickly, with just a few complex cuts. Most of it could be done with the powered miter box (great Father's Day gift, btw). A few boards required being ripped down on the table saw which was a hassle since that meant trekking up the hill to H1 to cut them and hope the measurements were right the first time.

The things that remained in this room: floor trim- it was given a fresh coat of paint and we needed to add shoe molding (not pictured) due to the change from carpet to laminate; windows- Pella windows that were factory finished in white, one of the better choices we made when we built the house; mirrored closet doors- if it ain't broke don't fix it; light fixtures- the girls like them so they are adequate for now. I wouldn't mind switching them out for fans but they say no for now.

I would like to see a shelf built around most of the room where the wall meets the angled portion of the ceiling for all my daughter's stuffed animals. I'd also like to see some trim on the ceiling. There is a rectangular area around the light fixture which is somewhat sunken. It is the result of amateur mudding when we built the house and I think decorative molding would enhance the room as well as disguise the flaw. It isn't a big deal, though, probably not noticeable to most people, and definitely a project that can wait.

Still needs to be done:
window hardware, painted furniture, decor, final cleaning once the dust in the rest of the house has settled.

What's next?

After addressing the worst of the odor issues, the next quandry literally became, "what do we do next?"

The thing about this house was that we built it for someone else. We chose flooring, kitchen cabinets and counters, bathroom faucets and fixtures all with my mother-in-law's taste in mind. There were some things we never got around to finishing when we first built it and there were areas where we chose a budget option that didn't stand up to 8 years of use and needed to be replaced. Plus let's not forget about the floors, doors, walls, etc., damaged by the animals.

It seemed like every project was pulling a thread causing 6 more projects to unravel. The kitchen cabinets were filthy. Beyond gross. Should I bother washing them, though, or should we just replace them? Several had damage: the bottom of the sink cabinet looked rotted, a narrow cabinet door was busted off its hinges, potatoes or something had rotted inside a drawer and permanently stained it. Was it worth trying to clean them when I didn't like the pickled oak finish anyway? If we replaced them we'd have a chance to rework a very tiny kitchen layout, turning the kitchen & dining room into one larger, more functional eat-in kitchen space.

Cleaning = $7 for a box of TSP and 4 pack of sponges from the dollar store.
Painting = $100 for primer, paint, glaze, finishing wax, sandpaper and cheesecloth.
Replacing = $5000-12,000 depending on how many, style, etc.

Replacing was the preferred choice but was out of the question until we sold our house and had the means to afford it. We turned instead to the staircase.

The house looks very traditional cape cod on the outside. Inside, it is a bunch of odd angles. Unique and cute, but unusual. When we built the house we were on a tight budget made even tighter by a contractor who mis-quoted. Seemed he realized half-way into the building that he forgot the cost of the trusses in his bid. This is why you never take the low quote... but I digress.

The staircase is a focal point of the front entry and could have been something beautiful, but in a hurry, exhausted, frustrated, not thinking clearly, we chose to drywall the room side about 40" high and cap the top of that with a nice oak board. Which was ok, but then we were forced to add a handrail by the building inspector anyway. So it looked a little boxy and dull. It really needs to be replaced with an open rail and banister. My husband wondered if we shouldn't knock out that wall completely and have a rail that overlooked the stairs going to the basement below the stairs going up. This would have been gorgeous on a home like the one we are in now, where there is a beautiful walkout basement flooded with natural light. But this basement won't ever be that way. Even once it is finished and we have the family room down there, it will never be the kind of basement you want completely open to the upstairs.

Unsure about exactly what to do with the stairs we looked to the floor. The narrow oak hardwood planks would need to be sanded and refinished if we were going to keep them. There was a huge black water damage stain in the dining room a foot in front of the french doors that led to the deck. We believed this was due to the pets' water bowl being placed on a rug in front of the doors and that over the years when it spilled it was left to dry on the rug, ruining the floor underneath. We weren't sure if we could sand it out. The flooring was laid on an angle so replacing that one area would mean ripping out half the dining room floor. Plus there was another issue- the kitchen was tiled but if we were replacing the floor we'd want to put the new hardwood or laminiate into the kitchen. The cabinets were set in place on top of the floor. To replace the floor we needed to decide what to do with the cabinets. In the living room we had a similar dilemma. To replace the flooring we needed to decide whether we were ripping down the entire stairway wall and installing rails or leaving the bottom portion of the stair wall. Essentially, flooring required too many other decisions- postpone that one.

The laundry area needed addressing, but since it was non-essential it seemed silly to start there.

Master bedroom - carpet or hardwood? If hardwood, we'd want to carry what we replaced the rest of the main floor with right on through. So other than painting, not much we could do there. Master bath would need to be gutted, requiring funds that we didn't have yet.

Every single project we needed to do came up against reasons why it shouldn't be first. Finally in our exhaustion my husband realized that if we were to sell our house- what we refer to as H1- promptly what we'd need most is a place to sleep and a bathroom. The rest we could work around, but we'd need to clean out the basement and garage to store all our stuff and we'd need two bedrooms and a bathroom at the very least.

The upstairs became our focus then, kind of by default. It wasn't the most thrilling project, but it was one that we needed to get done and for what it was worth, it would be among the easier things we would tackle.