Daily Note: November 15, 2008

Before and afters seem to be popular with my two loyal readers so here are some more. Oh, and to answer Lindsey's question in the comments, we live in Maple Leaf, which is north of UW, but south of Northgate. If you drew a line North from the Roosevelt Whole Foods and a line East from Dukes Chowder House on Greenlake they would intersect at our house. I have a feeling that only made sense to me, but whatever.

So this before/during/after series is of our stairwell and upstairs landing.

First is the before photo. Note the filthy carpet that had been in the house for years and years before we bought it.

Here is the before of the landing upstairs. Note the sad, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, which was our only source of light.
This next one was taken after we ripped up all the old carpet. We were hoping for slightly beat up original floors, but instead we found fir floors that had been painted gray with bare spots stained black on the treads. Pretty.
And here are the floors after we had them professionally refinished and stained, but before we'd painted (you can see the different paint color where the carpet had been on the sides).
Here I am sanding all the cracks in the plaster.
This is what our upstairs landing looked like for a week or two during the sanding process.
And then I painted the fronts of the steps white:
Here we are priming all the walls and trim work. This photo makes me laugh every time. Jeff thought he was so smart by devising a "tool" which would allow him to cut-in on the ceiling (Jeff is always in charge of cutting-in and I always roll). His "tool" is a long pipe that Jeff found in the basement and he basically just stuck a paint brush in the end of the tube. Then he would gingerly wave the tool left to right over his head while the paint sort of swiped the edges where the ceiling meets the walls. It worked, so I couldn't laugh too hard. Every time I would laugh he would say, "When I patent this brilliant invention and sell it to painters world-wide, guess who will be laughing then?!"
Here's the first flight of stairs after we finished painting and in the midst of Jeff building/installing a hand rail.
And here's the landing taken from our bedroom after it was all done. Note the new light fixture that replaced the bare bulb. It makes me feel like I'm in a submarine. In a good way.
And here is the stairwell 99% finished (we don't have a good shot of it 100% finished, but you get the idea). We have since filled all the frames with pictures of family and friends (I think in this photo they just have post-it notes on them so we could decide which photo would go in which picture).