Making the stairs beautiful

OK so I know its been months. MONTHS. We've done a few projects since then. The first big one was the stairs.

Lots of prep for this. Sanding and cleaning and removing nails and sanding and removing rubber and cleaning and sanding. Oh and sanding.

So we sanded and sanded and sanded (and sanded and sanded) and then painted the risers white.

So pretty right?

We toyed with the idea of keeping the treads that color, as they matched the floor and complimented everything well. but that would be too easy! We have a darker stain on many of the doors and furniture in the house so we opted to so the same on the treads. 

As if the sanding weren't hard enough now you had to clean and wipe down every single stair to prepare it for the stain. If you've been to our house you know that there's dog hair everywhere, all the time. So this was tedious. 

Then the staining starts. Slowly. Real slowly. Staining, and I think painting in general, is such a process you think you can fly through but really if you don't move slow you can mess everything up really quickly. 

The best technique (that we learned) is to do every other stair. That way you aren't trapped upstairs or downstairs until the stairs dry.

18 hours later (seriously).

The rips of paper towel are to remind us that those stairs are dry and the other ones are wet. That way we didn't walk on them and mess everything up.