Oxley Woods Living

Life in an Oxley Woods eco house

 
 

Posts Tagged ‘painting stairs’

 

The person under the stairs…

March 10, 2009

OK, not as scary as “The People Under the Stairs” was supposed to be, but it’s still pretty horrifying watching your “new” home being taken apart room by room, bit by bit.  Following on from our “flexible housing” issue with stairs dropping and cracking, we had some work done in the middle of November 2008 to sort out the issue.

To do this, a large “service hatch” was cut in the wall between the stairs and the cupboard below, and the stairs were reinforced and “fixed” from below with whole new sections put in place to take the strain and keep things where they should be.

The “blocks” (I’m not a carpenter, does it show) that had been put in the corners and nailed through to keep the stairs true and in place just seemed insufficient for the task at hand, and it is a concern that the rest of the stairs still look like this from underneath.  But so far the repairs are holding out, and so are the stairs.

The skimmer came around quite soon after and sorted the repair, I painted it myself, as it seemed quicker and easier.  I still have to repair the cosmetic damage caused to the paint on the stairs where they dropped away at the back from the riser.  Really frustrating, and inconvenient.

In the photos, the areas/wood sections with glue on them are all part of the apparently quite significant reinforcement/repair work that was carried out.

Cheap, cheerful, and very white..

October 16, 2008

We’ve painted the stairs!

After much deliberation over what exactly to so with the stairs in our home, we decided that we couldn’t shift the idea of painting them from our minds, so it was at least worth a shot.

Reading up about painting stairs on the internet, we discovered that everyone seems to have a different opinion on not only how to do it, but even if you should do it.  ”It’s too noisy”, “It’s too slippy”, “It’s too complicated”, “It’ll look worn really fast” seemed to be the general concensus, so we decided to go for it.  After all, the plain on stairs were not too noisy on their own, so painting them wont make much difference!

So, with that in mind, I wandered into the local B&Q and bought a 2.5 litre tin of white floor paint.  After carefully arranging with the wife and kids some good times to work on the stairs, I first sanded them all down using a little Black & Decker mouse with 80 grit sanding pads, then set about filling in imperfections etc with some standard “pine” coloured wood filler.  This took ages, and was a very, very messy job.

Anyway, once this had been done, the following weekend I set about painting the stairs, in actual fact it took two weekends, and between four and five coats before I was happy with the finish (not to mention another 2.5 litres of paint), and some areas I feel will still need more.  But the reaction from every visitor (and we get a lot, thanks to other issues!) has been positive, and we really, really like it.  The look at night on the top flight is quite eery at times with the moon shining in through the skylight above, and downstairs isn’t as pitch black and hazardous as it was when it was wood.

I’m certain it will need topping up here and there as time goes on, but it’ll be easy to touch it up and give it a quick sand and repaint when required.  It looks great, and reminds Abi of the “Imagine” video, which is cool with me.

Now we just need to save and decide what to do on the landings?!