One Step at a Time!

Once those were out, we started cutting the risers and treads to fit.

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Then it was time to start putting the stairs back up … one at a time!

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Once that was all done, we had to do the hardest part, which was transitioning from the engineered hardwood to the actual hardwood stairs. I’m not going to lie. We were pretty nervous about this! We talked through it and figured out the best way to do it. Because the transition piece we had was thicker than the engineered wood, we had to trim the inside of the transition piece to the same thickness of the engineered wood. We did this slowly and methodically and eventually got them to the same thickness. Then came another scary test of our skill. We had to cut the engineered floor to the depth of the transition piece. We did that with what we fondly call our “bad ass saw”, which has a real name of oscillating saw. But we’ve referred to it as the bad ass saw for so long, I had to actually ask Keith its real name! We started with it looking like this.

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Then we measured and screwed in a piece of wood to follow to ensure we cut a straight line, and then we started cutting.

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Here is what we ended up with. We are so proud of ourselves for this, which is probably silly, but it was definitely a challenge!

Here is a final view of the stairwell from the top down.

We still have a lot of trim and caulking and painting to do on the stairs, but they look terrific and we are pleased. Once we finished up the steps, it was time to put on the topper. We’ve been living with a raw drywall top for the past three months. We aren’t finished, but we got the topper on today. We were very limited as to the options of wood we could get in the length we needed, so we had to go with a prime grade pine. In order to minimize any of the knots and imperfections which are typically found in pine, I used a lot of wood filler to cover all of the holes. Then a lot of sanding had to happen to get them smooth for painting. Once that was done, we took the boards up and carefully measured them to get our miter cuts as perfect as possible. Then it was time to cut and install and get a primer coat on them!

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Hopefully before we head back to Atlanta we can get the trim up and finish up painting the topper. The trim will end up looking like this.

For those of you who know me well, I am a bit of an energizer bunny with multiple projects going on at any given time. I mentioned last week that I finally finished sanding the outdoor chairs. I was able to get two coats of polyurethane on them this weekend, and they’re starting to look really good! I’ll probably put two more coats on before we put them outside.

One other project I’ve had on my to-do list was to finally put up the art I had planned for the long entry hall. I bought some prints from my very talented friend, Linda LeTard. Linda is the amazing artist who painted this picture of Chloe which Keith gave me for our first anniversary (aptly, a “paper” anniversary).

Linda had some beautiful sketches from Acadian Village, which is in Lafayette, LA only about 50 miles from where I grew up. I’ve admired these sketches and asked her if I could have prints of them, since I knew exactly where I wanted to put them in the mountain house. Since we’re on a budget, I bought inexpensive Ikea Ribba frames and some mats from Amazon and put them together. I am so happy with the end result!

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Aren’t they gorgeous! Thank you Linda! You’ve made my long skinny hall a nice little gallery of your amazing talent!