Project De-Uglify Our House…
So, these stairs are the stairs to our UGLY basement. Thick, green shag baby!
I have yet to ever show you all pictures of our basement because its just that hideous. We live on the main floor of our house, so we’ve never had the need to update down there. We’ve been focusing our energies and renovation dollars on the more “live-able” spaces in our house. AKA everywhere else but the basement!
When we first moved in, the carpets in the two bedrooms down there were moldy. We removed them and bleached the floors. We didn’t remove the carpet on the stairs because…. I don’t know why. It wasn’t moldy and we were running out of steam.
For my birthday, my hubbie attacked those stairs and ripped up that ugly green shag for me! I was hoping the stairs underneath would be paintable– but they are in not great shape so we will most likely need to recover with new carpet when the time comes.
I thought it’d be super cute to do something like this!
In the mean time, I’m glad that dirty, ugly carpet is out of my house!
(But the kitchen carpet is still there! Ew. We have plans for that this summer!)
Nate said it cost him less than $3 to take the old carpet to the dump, so this was a very frugal and very refreshing project for us. The next step, recovering them, won’t be as cheap, but I’m grateful for the lack of shag in my house now.
Oh, and I can’t forget my hubbie’s super cute “helper!” She had “tools” (a spatula) and was hammering away in the kitchen while daddy worked on the stairs. It was stinkin’ adorable!
Amanda L replied:
Have you thought about sanding and then staining the steps? We did this to our stairs that were in similar condition, and it looks great. We rented an electric sander for around $15, and had that part done in a day. The staining took 3-4 days to allow drying between coats. I think the stain was about $20/gallon at Lowe’s and we only used half for this project, so I used the rest on a wooden picnic table we have in the back yard.
February 5, 2012 at 4:56 pm. Permalink.
Rachel replied:
I have though about sanding them, though we would most likely paint instead of stain. The actual stairs themselves have ugly gaps between them we’d have to repair if we took that route. I’m not sure we have the skills to do that much work on them when it would be easier and safer for our kids to have them padded and carpeted. We shall see though! Its pretty low on the priority list at the moment as we still have SO much to do on our nursery before the baby arrives! I’ll keep ya’ll posted!
February 7, 2012 at 8:55 pm. Permalink.