The second flight of stairs

My son Arthur and grandson Jack were here visiting last week. That time just flew by! But while they were here, Arthur helped me with two projects I've been meaning to do. One, he cut back a lot of the dead wood and "suckers" out of the trees and bushes in front of our house. I love the way it looks now! And I'm going to plant a succulent garden there - beautiful and drought-resistant. Arthur loves succulents and he inspired me. He has a greenhouse full of them at his home in Portland. We went for walks in my neighborhood while he was here and saw many yards full of beautiful succulents. It makes perfect sense in our perpetual drought situation.

     The other project he got me started on was the second half of our stairs going up to the second story. Wayne and I had taken the carpet off the lower half long ago, and had sanded and more-or-less finished the steps and landing nicely. But we left the carpet on the second half of the stairs "for later". Funny how longer "later" can be! Here was the first half.

     Arthur and I stripped that dirty old carpet and its underlayer off, and he got all the nails and boards and staples out too. Of course, like the first half, the treads and risers are covered in a yucky brown and fully leaded paint. Who knows why? And it's worn, so people must have walked on it for a long time "as is". Ghastly.
 
We don't like to sand leaded paint in the house, and I don't like wearing that big mask to avoid breathing in all that lead. So I am stripping the stairs of the lead paint before sanding. And I'm using a safer stripper so I don't have to wear a mask at all. The kind I'm using is called Citristrip, and it works very well. It has to stay on about 30 to 45 minutes, and then you scrape it and the paint off. I have to use a wire brush on the treads because the wood grain is grooved and there's paint in them thar' grooves. Still, it works and it doesn't eat your hands or poison you. Here's what I've done so far. More tomorrow.
     When the stripping is finished and the sanding is done, we plan to varnish and seal the steps. They don't really need to be stained as they're quite a nice color. Can't wait to have beautiful stairs!
     It sure was fun having Arthur and Jack here, and not just because they "helped". Now I miss them, of course!

Spring renewal: The front steps

It's starting to be time for spring renewal around our house and one of the first projects that came to mind were the front steps. Wow, we were looking a little derelict, if I must say so. I guess it had been at least ten years since the steps were painted and it showed!


Here they are just after we started to work on them, so even though we had started to scrape the bottom step, they honestly didn't look much better than this. Poor babies!

We scraped and sanded and scraped and sanded. One of the steps is concrete, the other two are wood, and the sides are stucco. We also did some repair on the stucco. By the end of the first day we had finished the prep and had primed the whole thing white. That white really stood out - I can't say it looked 100% better than the derelict look, but we were making necessary progress. We quit for the day.

The next day we painted, and when we were nearly done we realized we had the wrong color. It was red, as the steps had been before and as the trim on our house is, but it was really really red. I'm saying it didn't match any of the other reds, sigh. The other can of red paint, which did say porch and floor on it, was too old to use. It had gotten all gummy. I went down to the local Ace Hardware and got another can of that, the Porch and Floor, in Tile Red.

Bingo! It was the right color and an extra coat of paint never hurt anything. Especially since we got it done and dried before the next rain! Here they are  - aren't they gorgeous?

Only problem is, now the porch obviously needs paint too. Well, that's the way with house projects. One leads to another.

P.S. Those are cauliflower plants alongside the steps, and they each have a baby cauliflower down in the middle of the leaves. Yum!

A shoe rack: Order out of chaos

Wayne put up a shoe rack by our back door the other day, and it's made our life a lot more orderly! Who could imagine such a small simple thing could make such a difference?

In the interest of less dirt on the floors, we try to take our shoes off when we come in. Of course, up until now, that has resulted in a pile of shoes by the back door. And wow, what a messy dirty pile it was, with all this rain and leaves and mud on the bottoms. We could hardly get the back door open sometimes for shoes. Not to mention, in order to sweep I had to pick up all the shoes first and put them somewhere else (in a pile).

Isn't this cool?? So neat. So clean. So out of the way!

It was easy to make, too. I saw this video a couple of months ago and kept it with the intention of making just such a rack. First, I love it that the construction person making the video is Sawdust Girl - you don't get so many how-to construction things done by women, and why not?? We know how to do things too, right?

Anyway, I bought the pegs she recommended and then let them sit while all the holiday madness swirled around us. If they hadn't been out on my desk, I might have forgotten about them. The other day, we finally got around to it.

What a great idea!!

It's a brand new year!

Do you make New Year's resolutions? I used to, when we had a neighborhood NYE party every year and we could all report on "how we'd done" with last year's resolutions. It was pretty hilarious, because none of us ever did what we said we were going to do. Sometimes we did the opposite. I was right there with the herd. Now that I'm working through most of the holiday season bartending, and most especially working New Year's Eve, the party is just a fond memory and I've decided to do away with resolutions too.

Instead, I'm adopting a New Attitude with the New Year, with the intention of enjoying life more and keeping healthy and active.

Of course I've always been active. God knows, I routinely take on twice the number of projects and interests than it would be possible for anyone to accomplish in 24 hours a day. It makes me happy to accomplish and to create (cooking, sewing, writing), but this habit also causes me anxiety. When you have five or more projects running concurrently, how can you finish? Are you doing a good job of anything? Where do the hours go? Well, they fly by. And am I really enjoying my life? Hmmmm.Good question.

So what am I doing now that will come out differently? Well, I haven't decided not to take on projects, but I've stopped making a list of everything I'm going to accomplish each day. This was useful when I was working fulltime and raising a family but now it ties me too closely to the clock. I'm finding it difficult to put something I decided I was going to do today off till another day. I get anxious when I'm not making the progress I determined I should. Why does this matter to me now? Why is it so important? It's not, and I've stopped. Because of this attitude adjustment, I now concentrate on finding pleasure in my day, and in what I'm doing. Whatever it is.

Here are a couple of the projects I've taken on this New Year. One is already finished, a plushy dog bed cover for my neighbor Par, who is a gracefully aging Akida - a large dog who is almost 13 years old, somewhere in his 90s in human years. He's such a sweetheart that my cat Nero even comes out to touch noses when he comes by. Here's Par on his new bed.


And then there are the stairs in our home.

This is a more long-term project - here's where we are at the moment. And here's a piece I wrote recently for my writing group about this project called, "At The Time It Seemed Like Such A Small Thing . . ."



* * *

At the time it seemed like such a small thing. We just tear the carpet off the stairs and it's done. No more dirty white carpet, no smell, just nice wood steps. Maybe the treads were oak, like the floors in the rest of the house. Maybe not. Fir was fine too.

            We did the landing first, as it smelled the worst thanks to a war between two male cats. Even though the main perpetrator died a few years ago, eliminating the need for the other cat to spray in response, the landing still smelled. We rented a carpet cleaner and cleaned it ourselves. Then we hired a carpet service to really detail that landing. As soon as warm weather came, it was pungent as ever. After awhile, yellow started to show on the edge of the carpet and we realized cat pee must have penetrated into the foam layer under the carpet, and maybe even into the floor under that. We thought we'd have to lift the carpet and replace the under layer. Or something.

            It took a long time to decide to take up the carpet completely. It happened when I saw that my son had taken up an unattractive carpet on the stairs in his home in Portland to expose the wood. It looked great. I came home with determination to do the same.

            When we pulled the carpet and then the foam off the landing, we found that the carpet and foam underneath were disgusting, as were the wood tack bars that had been nailed to the floor to hold everything in. This was no surprise, all was soaked with cat pee. On the positive side the landing was beautiful oak, although with paint splotches here and there and in need of refinishing. A pretty good first start.

            Then we pulled the carpet off the lower set of stairs and saw fir, covered with a truly ugly brown stain that looked like paint. Not so great, although the steps themselves were in good condition. Maybe just a little sanding and some stain and varathane, right? Wayne naturally checked for lead in the brown paint/stain on our 100-year-old stairs and it was full of it. Uh-oh. Now the sanding would take on the atmosphere of space exploration – big masks, ventilators, air cleaners, waving curtains of plastic sealing off the area. And it would take more time.

            We immediately decided to leave the carpet on the upper stairs intact until we finished the landing and lower stairs. It's called project timeline management. And we decided to paint over the stain on the stair risers with satin-finish black paint, as they were the most inferior wood and this solution would involve less sanding of lead. That's called gutless compromise.

            We started this project Sunday January 4. We gave ourselves three days start to finish. Today is Wednesday January 14 and, true, we took a few days off in the middle to get other things done. So far we've stripped off the carpet and the foam underlayer, removed all the nailed-in tack bars and hundreds of staples, sanded all the treads in our spacesuits, and vacuumed the stairs and landing countless times. In addition, I tore apart and cleaned every surface and every pot and utensil that was sitting out in the kitchen because, after all this, we failed to close the door between the stairwell and the kitchen while we were sanding. Argh, lead. All this took the three days we had allocated.

            Today we are starting again with sanding the landing, which is not lead. Then we will paint the risers and stain and varathane the landing and treads, which we hope will take no more than three days including one day drying because we will use quick-dry varathane. I can't imagine not being able to use the stairs for the almost-a-week traditional varathane takes to really dry hard. Where would we sleep? Where would we shower? Et cetera.

            Bottom line, home projects may seem like they're going to be small, but ha-ha! They're almost always not.

* * *

 

Yes indeed, isn't that the true story of home projects? Regardless, our stairs are going to be beautiful when they're finished, and I'm NOT so worried about when that will be.

 

I made a few other attitude changes too, but this post is becoming a novel. More about this later.

I hope your year is a fabulous one for you!