The stairway from hell has now been made more angelic! Its pretty much done except for a few touch-ups. Behold the pictures:

Before: cheap baseboards, carpet glue and water stains...

make way for sanded floors and fancy trim. We discovered the corner blocks when we realized our mitre box was too small to cut the larger baseboards (which are more appropriate to the age of the house). Thankfully we found reproductions at a building centre in town. This stairway is not orginal to the house, it was added on in the 70's when the house was turned into 2 apartments for awhile. You can see the former brick exterior wall on the right side of the stairs in the pictures below.

A new mat from Ikea to hide the shoddy workmanship on the bottom landing (by a previous owner!)

Hideous fake brass lamp and water-stained primer painted walls....

make way for clean khaki walls, an unassuming Ikea lamp and a crisp white roman shade.

"I highly disapprove of this mess."

Oh but, hello lovely white stairs without any carpet glue!

As promised, here are some pictures of the (almost) completed bedroom. The only thing left is to buy and hang some art and a mirror.

The before pictures are here.

This green with red is one of my favorite colour combos (although I'm not sure everyone's monitors will reflect the true colours) so I've been wanting to try doing a room with them. The white on the woodwork really freshens it up.

The shelves are an Ikea find and I'm very happy with how they turned out. They are sturdy enough to hold a few treasures, but not so heavy as to burden the delicate plaster walls too much. (Those of us with old houses know that sometimes one nail can cause a disaster lol)

The floor turned out pretty good. I painted it dark brown and covered the dodgy parts with a white mat. I also put down a mats on either side of the bed (or rather, on one side a mat and the other side a sheepskin).

The baseboards cleaned up with quarter-round added. No more creepy holes!

This isn't a great picture, but I painted this old buffet white, which is now my dresser, and left a bit of the old blue showing through on the handles. This is a really lovely piece that has seen some pretty awful finishes during it's lifetime--but I think the white really suits it.

And that's about it. There's nothing like a clean new room to go to sleep in every night :-)

The stairwell is almost finished. I'll post some before/after pictures of that in a few days.

Oh right, I have a blog.

I've finally let myself calm down and enjoy summer. I had this frantic list of things that had to get done... and a "what the heck am I doing sitting here when things need to be done?" attitude. I got some major stuff done, but I still did a lot of sitting and feeling guilty about it. So neurotic.



But now I'm in full on summer mode. What's that you say? There's a pile of mulch outside to be spread around? The hallway needs to be caulked and painted? I still haven't bought a mirror and framed some artwork for the bedroom? The garden needs weeding? Sorry, I can't hear you.

It all started when Pete stated that we were going to the beach a couple of Sunday's ago AND that we were going to go to the beach once every weekend. At first my eyes opened widely and I started to shake and stutter. But but but but... how? I begrudgingly went along with him to the beach. When we got there I was suddenly and completely hypnotized. Yes... yes we will do this.... every weekend.



List? What list.