Flip With Love: stairs

With the warm weather has come A LOT of weeding. While we were attempting to get out some of the over grown areas off the back patio we came across a old, rotten stairs, winding around a large rock toward the side of the house. It felt very Secret Garden, and we decided it needed a little help.

With a lot of raking, weeding and will power, everything finally came out.

We leveled the surface for each step and used extra blocks lying around the property to create the stairs.

The make things look a little more clean, and hopefully help with any weed growth, we packed stone around the edges and between the steps.

We wanted to make the path look more defined so we continued the stones all the way to the beginning of the garden.

Excuse the leaves, Joe lives to use his new weed whacker. 😚

We're making progress! Till next time..

Amanda & Joe

We were both born in the 80's and while we like 80's music and appreciate the fashion, the decor is something we could live without. When we bought our condo the entire unit, including the stairs had the original 80's carpet - no thank you! The first job when we got into our house was to have it all removed and put in new floors. While picking out our floors (we went with some amazing dark bamboo) we realized the stairs were going to pose a problem. Our stairs are in the center of the house, and are open to the living and dining room so they needed to look nice. Unfortunately, bamboo stair treads are pretty expensive and we have quite a few so, we decided to take the DIY approach.

We were super lucky when our carpet came up there was actually some pretty decent wood on the stairs. We were determined to bring them back to life! Nothing some sanding painting, and staining won't fix. I personally LOVE how they turned out, it's actually one of my favorite project results of the entire renovation. Check it out!

What we used:
1. Palm Sander
2. BIN Primer
3. White High Gloss Interior Paint
4. Custom Stain
5. Fast Drying Polyurethane

Every single piece of railing had to be sanded, primed, and painted (yikes!).

But my beloved paint sprayer made it a slightly less time consuming task.

We used a high gloss interior white paint for the face and the sides of the stairs. Then we took a piece of our swanky new floors to the paint store and had them custom match a stain for us.

I ended up using three coats of stain on the treads, a few had to be completely re-sanded and stained three more times, since some people couldn't manage to stay off my beautiful work in progress stairs - don't worry that wasn't irritating at all (lie).

Once the stain had dried we used two coats of sealer, sanding with a fine grit sand paper in between.

Once the touch ups we're done we put our actual bamboo flooring, which is all over the top two levels of the house, on the landings. This tied the whole stairs together and you don't even notice that the treads aren't bamboo - totally thrilled with the stain!

The results!