Okay guys, I am doing my first major reveal from our home. It’s been a long and slow process getting to this point, and we still have a lot more work to do but it is definitely coming along and it’s so nice to be living here and making it our very own. From the pictures that I posted here, you can see the whole house was pretty dated, but the stairs were a huge eyesore. They are the first things you see when you come in the front door and they were not pretty, at all. So they were on our top priority list of things that needed to be replaced. Here are a few of the before pictures.
The rails were two boards attached to some posts, with a big planter box at the top of the stairs.
This picture is pretty blurry, but here is the planter box. Ugg.
To begin, we knocked out all of the railings and tore out the posts and planter box.
We hired a friend to come over and help us out with the installation, and picked out our new hand rails, newel posts and balusters.
For our hand rails and newel posts, we ordered them from L.J. Smith Stair Systems.
We decided to go with this newel post in hemlock:
This handrail …
And we ordered these balusters from Lowe’s.
The posts and handrails were all natural wood when we got them and needed to be stained. Our contractor had some Minwax samples on hand, so I painted them on a board to get a better idea of what they looked like.
#1 Cherry
#2 Hickory in Gel Stain
#3 Espresso
#4 Special Walnut
I like darker stain, plus we bought hickory hardwood for the kitchen dining room, which I love, so we decided to go with #3.
We were swamped with getting things ready for our carpet to get put in, so we hired it out, and I was beyond thrilled with the results. Here are the afters:
And a little peek into our upstairs toy explosion…
One more look at the before and after…
We also had new carpet installed and painted the walls Accessible Beige by Sherwin-Williams, more details about that here. It feels 100 times better and I love being able to put a big fat check mark next to this project on our to do-list, that is slowly shrinking. There will be a lot more before and after’s from this house, it’s fun to look at where we came from. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments. Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!