Faster than I thought

After devoting 2 of my entire weekends to sanding the stairs I think we are almost done. We are offically done with the 40 grit sandpaper on the steps and just have a little bit of 60 grit left to do on the trim. In the middle of sanding this weekend my Ryobi sander died on me. I took it into Home Depot and they gave me a new one. Apparently my drive belt broke. I press a little hard on the sander to get more off in less time. I had to break the new one in for an hour or so to get it back up to my standards of sanding =)

Here is what the stairs look like now:


Top of stairs looking down:


Next we'll sand a medium grit, then fine, then very fine. The great thing about the other sand paper is that you're no longer trying to get rid of any imperfections so it goes pretty quick. In fact we might be able to get it all done this coming weekend.

Oh yeah... I'm soooo sick of dust!

Fun With Sanding...

So I'm sure you remember the long tedious process in which we recently sanded our massive Buffet. This weekend we just began another awful sanding project- the stairs. I have been dreading this for soooo long. The time has finally to just get them done and over with. This weekend I began working on the stairs and probably put a good 6 or 7 hours in of sanding. The worst part of sanding, besides vibrating hands, dried out sinuses and nausea, is the clean up. I have about 5 stairs left to go so I am almost done with the 40 coarse sand. After I am done with that I'll switch to medium, then fine, then very fine. I am hoping the have the stairs done within 2 more weekends of working on them. The worst part is using the course sand because you and sanding out all of the imperfections/ old stain and you spend about 1/2 hour or so on each step. The good news is that all of the other sand paper we use goes pretty quick!

So our plan is to sand the floors throughout the house with sanding machine before we stain and poly the stairs. Poly for stairs smells so awful that I would prefer to just knock out the entire house over the course of a weekend. Since you can't walk on it and all... Here are the photos of what the stairs use to look like- in case you forgot. I'll post updates tomorrow.


Not only do I have to sand these steps, but I also have to sand the landing and more steps to the right of that. *sigh

Workin it.

Last weekend we got quite a bit done on our front sun porch. We finished sanding the front door. We stained it pretty dark (ebony). We wanted it darker than our interior stain so that the front door really sticks out, on the exterior. We also sanded, and decided to just paint, the door frame and the window frame. It looks really good. All of the paint stripping really paid off. Although it was pretty tedious and time consuming. We still have alot of paint stripping to do around the windows and of course the bead board ceiling, which I will be staining- not painting. That should be a blast.

I didn't get a chance to take these until last night so they are a little dark. What do you think?


Otherwise we rehung pictures in the dining room and it made a huge difference. I got a really cool plant that fills some space in there too. Now I just need to get a center peice for the dining room table and some window treatments and blinds and we're all set.


I can't wait for Christmas. I can wait for the cold though.

New dining chairs

We didn't really have too much time for any projects this weekend. We went up to the cabin this weekend to take out the dock. All weekend I have been dreaming about these great dining room chairs that I saw last week. After going to check them out again we realized that the chairs I liked might be better accent chairs. The previous chairs we had were your basic Ikea chair- completely uncomfortable. We went to Odds and Ends and found these slingback chairs for $79/ chair- that's a steal. I'm not 109% sure of them- just like everything else that I paint or buy. I just really wish that I was 100% sure of them.



What do you guys think?




Here is the view where I think they just look really big- Almost like mad hatter chairs. Am I crazy? I might be obsessing a bit.