painting Archives

For the record, let me say this: painting your stairs is fairly easy, but very, very time consuming.

This is not a quick weekend project.

I highly recommend painting your stairs if you’re looking for a cheap facelift and/or to buy you some time until you can do a major stair remodel.

That being said … holy cow. This project was a chore. Awesome, but a chore.

If we could have tackled this on it’s own, it would have been fairly straight forward. But since we were now launching into painting the stairs in the middle of painting the entryway floor and door …

… and trying to finish the kitchen pantry …

… and the dishwasher breaking and needing to be hauled up and down those entry stairs and across the disastrous painted floor on not-so-much dry paint …

… and the stairs off the back deck deciding to rot and fall off at the same time leaving no other way to get in and out of the house …

… and not having a working entry light which meant that all painting had to be done during the day with kids around whose bedrooms and playroom are downstairs just made everything more complicated.

So I wasn’t surprised when Mr. Thrive got home the night of the paint-down-the-stairs-onto-the-entryway fiasco and was so, so not happy.

And can you blame him?

But we were committed, so I busted it to get going to try and fix everything in the two weeks left before company rolled into town.

The first thing I did was use a hammer to pull up the carpet tack strips that were nailed to the top of the treads and front of the risers. I had to use a chisel a couple of times to get the tack strips to lift up enough for the hammer to pull them loose.

I hadn’t ripped the carpet off the sides of the stair case or along the railing that first night …

… but the remnant carpet looked lame so off it came, too.

And then hundreds of staples had to get pulled out with pliers.

The super, tiny ones needed a small screw driver hammered underneath them to lift them up enough where I could grab them with pliers.

After four solid hours of ripping out staples and tack strips, I had some wicked awesome blisters. So here’s tip ladies: wear gloves for this part.

At this point I didn’t know how to proceed since as you can see in the picture above, the treads weren’t plywood or hardwood, but rather particle board that is notorious for leaching paint like a sponge. Plus it’s a lot coarser than plywood or hardwood steps. For 30 seconds, I really considered ripping up those cheapy particle board steps and putting down something that could be stained. But at $11 a tread, I was looking at a lot of money I still didn’t have.

So painting it was.

The nice thing about having particle board steps is that you don’t have to sand them down at all—in fact it’s a nightmare to even try. So the stained areas on the steps got a quick spot coat of KILZ …

… and then the whole thing got two heavy coats of oil-based primer.

And I was pleasantly surprised — the particle board took the paint very well. The first coat of primer sucked up a lot of paint and dried very light, but the second coat covered beautifully.

I had hoped two heavy coats of primer would hide all the staple holes everywhere.

Um, no.

After the first coat of primer it was pretty clear that no amount of paint was going to cover those bad boys.

So, tip #2: fill all the holes with wood putty and then sand smooth before priming and painting. It’s a total pain to have to go back to do that step after the painting has started.

Between my super-cautiousness-on-the-drying-times-after-the-floor-mess thing and the afore-mentioned issues with the rotting-back-stairs-and-dishwasher-and-painting-only-during-daylight thing, the prep work took a full week to complete before we were ready to start painting the finish colors.

Phew.

So for anyone wanting to paint their stairs – especially stairs with particle board treads, let’s recap how to do this the smart way.

Painting Your Stairs: Prep Work

1. Remove carpet and pad using pliers and the claw on the back of the hammer.

2. Remove the carpet tack strips with a hammer and chisel.

3. Remove staples using pliers.

4. Patch staple/nail holes with wood putty, allow to dry thoroughly, sand smooth.

5. Sand non-particle board areas like the risers/kick boards and sides of stairs lightly.

6. Sweep stairs and wipe clean.

7. Spot treat any stained areas with KILZ and allow to dry at least 30 minutes.

8. Coat stairs with two coats of oil-based primer, allowing each coat dry thoroughly.

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Back on Friday with the fun part – painting the finish colors!

And…. we’re back.

It’s so nice to dust off the ‘ol blog and get back to crafting, creating and remodeling. Or rather, it’s nice to attempt to do that.

Sheesh. Where do I even start?

In the midst of taking a break from blogging to deal with an interesting start to the year, work on the house has been plodding along slowly.

Our entry way is miserably small and has always bugged me. So coming up with a punch list of projects was easy: 1) repaint the front door; 2) fix the giant hole in the drywall from the kids’ infamous sledding-down-the-stairs-in-sleeping bags-and-crashing-into-the-wall-repeatedly stunt; and 3) do something with the floor.

The first step seemed easy enough – repaint the door.

Here’s what we started with before we started painting the upstairs grey—boring, scuffed up white.

But then I was stupid.

Somewhere, someplace, someone told me that spray painting a door was much easier than using a roller. So I primed the door with spray-on primer and made a huge mess everywhere.

Oh, and it stunk like crazy since spray painting inside—even with good ventilation—is always a bad idea. At the time I didn’t care since I had big, big plans for the floor and thankfully the kids weren’t home to be around the fumes. But man was it a mess … and my trigger control was a little iffy so the primer ran in places … and it left a weird grainy texture which meant extra sanding to even everything out. Yup-much easier.

For the actual color, I had seen this grey/red combo on the paint swatch card we had for the living room wall paint and loved it. Plus, I think I was still missing my red walls a little.

I watched the local paint recycling center for a few weeks hoping red paint would show up, but no deal. So when I found the perfect color in a spray can …

… I was stupid again … and rationalized that spending money on spray paint wasn’t as bad as buying a gallon of house paint … and told myself that I would just be ‘more careful’ with the trigger control this time … and drastically underestimated just how far spray paint can travel in a confined space … and made an even bigger mess. Plus the irony of using a paint+primer or a primer nightmare did not escape me.

Stupid woman.

I loved the color, but it never looked great. The coverage was splotchy and after four coats and three full cans, I gave up. I’m sure you spray paint ninjas out there could have nailed this, but the door looked terrible—so terrible that I apparently never took pictures. Oops. Let’s just pretend it looked like this, okay?

Actually, that’s fairly close.

At this point I could have just admitted that I’d screwed up, gone back to the store, figured out a way to buy some red paint to roll over top and everything would have been fine. But I realized that I really didn’t like the red after all … and worse still, I didn’t have a clue what color I did want instead. And there was no way that I was going to cheat and spend/waste money on paint again until I knew exactly what I was doing.

And so I just left my hot mess of a front door like that for six months. Mr. Thrive was so happy.

I finally decided that brown was the winner after looking at pictures of curtains for the living room. Come February, we set aside a little tax money for repairs around the house and I was so excited to actually be able to go buy paint that was in a color I got to choose and finally finish the front door. So I marched down to Lowe’s and grabbed some brown paint and couldn’t roller the new color on fast enough. It was sad people, but I did an honest-to-goodness fist pump at the register as the clerk rang up more than just tape and glue.

Two coats later + lots of sanding/taping/painting the trim …

… I have a front door that I LOVE + plenty of left over paint for some other projects in the kitchen.

(I’m thinking I need to get rid of those ugly brass nobs like I did here. Maybe in a brushed nickel or platinum finish …?)

And because I’m a Silhouette nerd with an affinity for vinyl, I couldn’t wait to put one of my favorite sayings on the inside of the door, too.

Ahhhhh. Much better.

So, what have we learned?

Do not – I repeat – do not use spray paint for interior doors that are still hanging.

Unless you’re a spray paint ninja.

But then only a really high, top-level spray paint ninja at that.

Smooth, foam rollers are much, much easier to use and will save you a ton of headaches and time.

Anyway, one entry way project down, two to go.

And do you see that little bit of check board goodness on the floor peeking through?

Yeah … that’s been a peach of a project. Stay tuned.

painting

How To Paint Your Stairs: Prep Work

How To Screw Up Painting Your Front Door