Step By Step

Hey peeps! If you celebrate a holiday, we hope it was a good one. We took the low-key, no-pressure route — no tree, no decorations, no nothing. Except this one little thing:

We totally dorked out and did stockings for the pets. The two on top are Margot’s and Jabba’s. The green one on the bottom is Smokey The Cat’s. And the Hello Kitty stocking on the left is for Bradley’s boss’s dog Paulie. He’s staying with us for a week while his people are in Paris.

Not gonna lie: we had way too much fun with that.

Both Bradley and I have the week off — kinda. Bradley really has the entire week off. I have to work for a couple of days. Boo! Hiss!! Luckily I don’t have to go into the office. While I worked, Bradley knocked off a couple of projects from our To-Do List.

The first task of the day, was to prime the staircase and hallway outside the master bedroom. Bradley started by dusting the walls:

Next up: one coat of primer.

The staircase looks so fresh and so clean-clean with a coat of paint.

And the space outside the master BR looks so much better:

We’ll eventually paint the walls a different color. This is great for now. We were pretty tired of staring at plastered drywall on our way upstairs.

The next day, Bradley finished removing the staples from the stairs:

We’ve spent days — literally 3 full eight-hour days — pulling staples from the stairs, but we still missed a bunch. Whoever put down the carpet went seriously overboard.

Once that was finished, Bradley tackled the wonky stairs that lead to the guest bedroom wing of the house. This is how they looked before:

The wood is split on some of the steps. And the face of each stairs — the spots with the white spray paint — is looking a little haggard.

Bradley’s solution was to take some 1/4″ birch plywood:

Cut it down to fit the face of each stair:

And nail it into place:

He did that for all 3 steps that lead up to the hallway:

Then he used wood putty and silicone to fill in the cracks and gaps. This made the steps look more tidy:

The entire staircase area looks much better:

We’re almost ready to sand and paint the stairs, but it’s going to require some careful planning. The guest bedroom wing is basically our headquarters right now. The bathroom is up there, plus we’re sleeping in the guest bedroom now. And we’re working hard to finish up the office soon so we don’t have laptops and cables scattered all over the house. Since we’ll need 48-72 hours for the paint to cure, we’ll have to work the painting around a trip out of town.

We’ll be back with more updates tomorrow. We have a ton of projects going right now, and we’re really, really close to crossing everything off of our To-Do List. Come back soon!

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