Wednesday, December 11, 2013
If there's a group of people we understand and identify with the most, it's easily the relatively small community of old home owners who are undertaking renovations either partially or fully on their own. It's one thing to own an old house, another to renovate it, but it's a whole other world to take on part or all of the work on your own. Any time we get together, either in person or virtually, I swear it's half party and half support group meeting.
Last week we were contacted by the fellow old house renovators and bloggers of Yellow Brick Home. Kim and Scott had a staircase dilemma. Their 120 year old Chicago home's stairs had seen better days. After removing the burgundy carpet that covered the stairs when they purchased the home (and undertaking a rather large renovation that included opening up the entryway), the treads and risers were chipped, pitted, and covered with cracked paint. After going through the many different options in their heads, Kim reached out to us for our two cents on how to handle their stairway conundrum.
Scott and I keep going back and forth on a project, and we're just feeling really, really stuck. After consuming way too many hours trying to figure out the best way to do this, I thought I'd give it a try and ask you guys what you thought. Any input would be very, very much appreciated - so thank you in advance.
Okay, the project is our staircase! We simply want to paint the risers white and the treads black. The problem? We did a lead test on them, and the stairs are currently covered in lead paint. They're really pocked and chipped in a ton of places, so we would have to really lay on wood filler and sand, sand, sand - which we can't do with lead paint! So, we considered using Peel Away (1 or 7?) to get rid of it, but we've never used that before, and to be honest, we're worried it's going to be a MASSIVE task (not that we're looking for an easy way out, but removing lead paint is so far from our idea of a good time).
The other option would be to replace the risers and treads. I started pulling apart the top 2 steps tonight, and it took me about 30-40 minutes to do that, but I still need to pull out the rusty, 100 year old nails. So, suffice it to say that we have 16 steps, it would be an entire day of just pulling up the stairs, then potentially another day or two to put together treads and risers (we found treads at Lowes for $10/ea). Then we got nervous that maybe there's more of a science to building stairs then just that...
Have you encountered anything like this? Would you say that Peel Away is easy enough to use so we can fill/sand the stairs and paint them so they look decent? Or would it be so much of a nightmare, that building new treads/risers would actually be the better choice?
Photo Credit: Yellow Brick Home
Well, talk about a question that is absolutely and 100% right in our wheelhouse! We've both been there and done that, and we know exactly the dilemma they're dealing with. Back when we bought our house our stairs were covered in ugly carpet, and we had dreams of removing the carpet to find beautiful stairs that didn't need any work (I think we had been watching too many renovation reality shows).
Instead, we found great treads that needed to be refinished and risers full of lumpy paint, some of which was likely lead based.
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