New Staircase

 After Camille put her head through not one, but two, spindles, we knew the handrails needed to eventually be replaced. We finally decided to do it.

I talked Ben into tearing out the carpet and installing hardwood stairs. The carpet was SO GROSS and it seemed like we might as well get rid of yucky, gross carpet while we could.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a MUCH bigger job than we ever expected.

We honestly thought the job would take less than a week- which was good after the bathroom remodel.

Instead, it ended up taking close to 7 weeks, and WE had to do much of the work.

The stair guy literally only did the install. We had to hire out someone to tuck in the carpet, stain/polyurethane the stairs, and do the paint.

Ben thought we could do the staining. I thought, "no way!" We hired the staining out, but after there was a death in his family and the job got pushed back yet another week, we decided to just do it. We went to a store that specializes in wood and they walked us through everything. They were beyond helpful and gave us a lot of confidence.

But, it took our entire Thanksgiving break. Between our whole family we put in over 40 hours to polyurethane (we actually ended up keeping the natural color and not adding any stain), paint, and then caulk.

We estimate we saved over $2,000 and it does feel slightly good that we did it ourselves, but if we knew what we were getting into, we probably wouldn't have done it- even if we do love it now.

But, really, we paid the stair guy WAYYYYYY too much money to have to do so much of the work ourselves.