As I have mentioned in my previous post, we did a massive renovation on the main staircase in our home. I touched on the fact that repainting the railing was a ton of work, but I didn’t really mention the amount of work that went into the floors as well. The previous owners had carpet going up the staircase and in the hallway, but Bradley and I really wanted dark hardwoods throughout the main portions of our home. We continued with one dark floor throughout, with the exception of the bedrooms and the finished basement. I think that hardwoods are beautiful in bedrooms, but I don’t like how cold they are (particularly in the winter). Bradley ripped up all of the carpet on the main staircase, and found about a thousand nails in the process – LOL! The installers then came in behind him and put down the new flooring board by board. Here are some in-process pics (handrail had been sanded and primer was already on the railing):
I love the above picture, because it really showcases how much work really went into renovating the front portion of our home. Notice all of the colors on the wall. Before it was all said and done, we probably put up 25 to 30 paint swatches before we went with the current color (Benjamin Moore – Baja Dunes). At first, we thought we wanted some sort of a grey tone, since this is what we were wanting to do in the kitchen. However, when we put them up on the wall, everything turned blue. We have a lot of light in our front entryway, so everything looked differently depending on the time of day and the amount of sunlight. I will also caution you that a lot of greys can inadvertently turn purple, so make sure and paint a swatch with the natural light! Keep it up for several days, and make sure to look both during the day and night!!!
Above is a picture of the landing at the top of the stairs, once the railing and walls had been painted. This is when the house really started to come together……….
Once the floors started to be installed, it finally seemed like we were really making some progress. We love home renovation, but I will caution you that it can be exhausting. It was a little easier on us since I was only pregnant at the time, and we didn’t have any little ones running around yet. This would have been MUCH harder to do with small children wondering around our construction site of a house. 🙂
Below is another view of the final product:
It looks SO MUCH BETTER, but again, I cannot stress how much work this was. It definitely takes much more time and effort than it looks like on HGTV!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
