Stair staining begins...

These stairs are seriously the project that never ends. I think they've already taken longer than the kitchen or either bathroom. On the up side we're finally starting to see some of the pay off. We stained half the stairs last night. We fiddled with blending stains etc, but 2 coats of this stain seems to match our hardwood the best. This is after 1 coat and it's already quite close (camera flash doesn't do it justice).

The staining is going to take quite a while because we need to go up and down the stairs so we have to do half of them at a time.

Dishwasher update

For those who haven't been following, the beginning of the dishwasher saga can be found here.

The technician just left. I didn't get a picture before he did the repair, but the basic idea was to replace the whole inside door panel. It now has some extra holes on the inside to help the steam to vent out the bottom as opposed to out the side of the door. This issue seems to be common when our Frigidaire dishwasher is installed at the end of a run.

(the rectangle made of holes is new)

We will monitor it when we do dishes next and update this post with the results.

*Update* we've run the dishwasher through a couple of times and it appears to have worked. We checked along side the dishwasher while it was running and the side of the cupboard was dry. The new fix vents more air downwards, so it might not work for people with wooden floors, but steam on our tile is preferable to steam on the Ikea cupboards.

Stairs update

This weekend we started working on revamping the stair treads/risers. We removed the carpeting we had added as a temporary fix last year, and cut the nosing off the existing treads. They were all pretty warped and some had split, so revitalizing them was out of the question.

We then spend the better part of yesterday cutting the new oak veneer treads we picked up at Rona to clad the old stairs. The old treads were far from square (of course) so cutting the treads took pretty much all day. Today we used construction adhesive to put on half of the stairs. Since we need to get to our bed room and the bathroom (the basement one is currently acting as a storage closet... but that's another post...) we could only put them on 1/2 at a time. We will also have to stain them 1/2 at a time :P the joys of living in your reno... Here is a picture of the first round of stairs. We ran out of paint cans to hold them down so we used some beer bottles we had near by.



Since sticking the stairs on didn't take too long, one of us finally got to start a much-needed craft project. We're computer geeks and cannot live without a computer to feed content to our TV. So to get rid of the unsightly box we bought an antique radio to build a computer inside of it. It's a long way from completion, but at least it's started now.


On an unrelated note, the part for our dishwasher was backordered and finally came in. The repairman is coming back this Wednesday. Lets hope it will work! I'm hoping to have the guts to geek out on him and ask to take a picture of what the new part looks like to show you all. ;0)

A long time coming...

After we moved in we laid hardwood in the living room and dining room (Nov 2008). Since it was on sale we bought enough to do the upstairs as well and last June/July 2009 we laid the hardwood in the master and guest bedrooms. Since then there has been a no mans' land between the bedrooms and the bathroom that has been unfinished. There has also been a pile of about 5 boxes in a corner of our bedroom waiting to be laid. Today we finally got the landing hardwood done. There is still a closet to be done, but this is great progress.

Happiness is smooth white walls

We finished sanding and priming this weekend. Up next:
- paint
- newel posts
- hardwood at top of stairs
- new stairs
- railing
- new tile for entry way

and then everything above grade will be done !! *woo*