Foyer/Stairs Makeover
Before
When we bought our house in April 2014, I knew the foyer and stairs HAD to be redone! The stairs were covered in gross carpet with a super old icky green stone foyer. We decided to redo them before we moved in so we could finish them and not have to worry about staying off of them when we were in the midst of making them pretty. This was a major trial and error project. We actually re-did them twice!!! :)
It was WAY more work and mess than we were prepared for but I am so proud of how they turned out.
For more information on the picture ledges pictured, click Picture Ledges
Here we go...
These stairs lead down to the lower level
We pulled the carpet up and started sanding
We had to strip the white paint off as there were many coats. This project was all elbow grease and very little money.
Pulled Staples from carpet
After we pulled everything up, we stripped all of the white paint off of the stairs, hand rail, and stringers. We filled all of the holes with wood filler then we started sanding...and sanding...and sanding. I still get a little queasy when I think about sanding. But we had to push through :) We broke both of our mouse sanders in the process so we had to go buy an orbital sander and 2 more mouse sanders along with tons and tons of sanding pads. We started with an 80 grit then worked our way to a finer grit and ended with a 220
You would have thought that sanding would have been the worst part right? Nope! It wasn't. We started to pull up the ugly green slate tile from the entry. The slate was actually pretty thin, around a half of an inch thick. But underneath the slate?!?! 3+ inches of cement! It was so horrible. Why would anybody do that??? Luckily I have a 12 year old that likes demolition! He got most of the slate up on his own!
No more green slate-Hello Hardwood
This is after we stained the stairs
