Friday, March 17, 2006 - The Stair Challenge Begins

Recently I decided that I wanted to rip all the carpet off my stairs and paint them. This seems like a good idea, and I've seen pictures on the internet of lovely painted stairs where there used to be crappy carpet. I figured I'd take some of my free time over spring break to rip all the carpet off the stairs and that would give me 6 weeks until school is out to decide exactly what I wanted to do in the way of paint. While this all seems very simple, it's not. Ok, so I start at the bottom step and start ripping off the carpet. Underneath the carpet is padding which is separately attached to the wood by staples. At the crease of each step are 2 strips of nail embedded wood that I guess serves to hold the carpet down in the creases. I'm already in over my head cause I didn't realize I'd have to dismantle this much crap. I just thought I'd be ripping the carpet off and pulling out errant carpet tacks. Thankfully Brad joined in and pulled off all the strips (and I only took the carpet off the first set of like 8 steps.) I decided at this point in time that I'm just gonna leave it like this and decide how much I really want to deal with this before dismantling the other 3 staircases. I mean frankly, it's alot easier to just recarpet one set of like 8 stairs then to have to redo an entire house. My next step will be to pull up all the staples with padding embedded in them left behind when I ripped up the padding. Those suckers just do not wanna come out. Next will be to caulk the gaping holes between each stair and adjacent riser and then fill in the massive crevace in the middle of the first step. Just keep repeating "but you'll never have to vaccum the stairs again....."