Buh Bye Carpet Stairs!!!

So… have you ever been vacuuming your stairs for the thousandth time and thought to yourself, “hmmm, wonder what is under there”?  And then, have you ever OBSESSED about the answer to that question so much that you wake up in the night thinking about it?  And then, do you ever wake up that next morning, grab pliers and rip that son of gun dirty carpet outta there???  Yeah, me too!  I have always wanted wooden stairs, and today was the day!  

Here is how it happened:

To remove the carpet I used 

1. Wonder Bra Bar (although, I also had a bra on!)

2. Pliers (the longer the handle, the better)

3. Work Gloves

4. Trash Can

5. Sledge Hammer ( I borrowed one from a neighbor)

I found a corner and started pulling! It was helpful to have a garbage can to throw the staples and carpet scraps in.  I tried a garbage bag and it was a pain in the tushie!  I used the long handled pliers to grip the carpet and pull, and the smaller ones to pull staples.  It was a messy job, and infact, a little sick to see all of the dirt that had worked it's way beyond the carpet and pad!  Even the Dyson wasn't touchin' that mess!

I will use the following diagram to use the 'proper' terms while I am describing what I found on my stairs.  Hope it helps!

I was lucky pretty lucky to find that under the carpet there was real wood!  There was pine on the risers and up on the inner string.  so, the only part of my stairs that I needed to replace were the treads.  They were cheap press board chippy sawdust stuff (yes, that is the technical term)!  Knowing that I wanted to stain the stairs, the yucky stuff had to go. 

Enter the SLEDGE HAMMER!  Trust me, those stairs aren't coming out with a regular hammer.  I started having a contest with myself to see how many whacks it would take to get a stair out! 5 was my record!  After my stairs were knocked out, I had to chip away at any leftover Liquid Nails or adhesive that did not come off.  You MUST do this so that your new stair treads will lay flat when they are installed.

So far it has been a lot of work and balancing!  At this point make sure that all the carpet, pad, staples, carpet strips, liquid nails and children are all gone!  You will have a big fat open staircase like this...

Now is the time to run to Lowes or Home Depot and buy new stair treads (actually, yesterday would have been a good time to buy so they can be acclimatized to your home)!  I bought mine at Home Depot for about $10 each.  I was going to buy thick pine and router the edges, but when I did the cost comparison, it was not worth it!  The pine treads are perfectly sanded and knot free.  They are also not going to warp, which I was afraid of with the raw wood. 

** They may be longer than you need.  I had to cut mine to the perfect length.  But, this was a good thing!  I measured, cut, and labeled each stair for a perfect fit!

Tomorrow we will patch, paint, stain, and install our beautiful new stairs!  Be careful tonight with your open staircase!  A broken leg is only gonna slow you down!

In the Beginning...

I have to tell you how great my childhood was.  We were the last house on Nanton Avenue.  I had a mother who let me experiment with all things creative.  She is an artist, and always had a multitude of craftiness all around.  I broke the old Kenmore sewing machine more than once.  I remember leaving mixed paper mache under my bed until it smelled rotten.  Do you remember the Childcraft Encyclopedia series?  Am I aging myself?  Well, my sweet mom actually would encourage me to do as many projects from book #11 {Make and Do} as I could!  Now that I am a mom, cleaning up the messes, I have to work very hard at being comfortable letting my daughter use markers, let alone mix plaster dipped with various items from the junk drawer!  What a lucky girl to have such an amazing mom!  And, I can almost guarantee that most of those projects are still in her basement!

Further down Nanton Avenue was one of my favorite grown-ups!  Diane was the creative guru I longed to be!  She taught me how to make stamps out of erasers and exacto knives, how to transfer images with irons, how to use a scroll saw, and how to make a basement a Crafting Mecca! She was fearless in her desire to try new things.  I wonder if the denim cow sculptures are still with her.

The things learned on Nanton Avenue have stuck with me for years and, in the end, I may not be very talented, but I love to try!  I am hoping this blog will help inspire me to step up my creativity.  One of my favorite thoughts comes from Uchtdorf...

 "The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before.

Everyone can create. You don’t need money, position, or influence in order to create something of substance or beauty.

Creation brings deep satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take unorganized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty—and I am not talking about the process of cleaning the rooms of your teenage children."

So, here is to upping up the creativity around here! This is going to be fun!