In case you missed it: here is part 1 of the stair saga. Above are the stairs with all the staples and carpet padding bits fully removed. Pretty scuffed up.

After some thought, we decided to simply paint the stairs and call it a day. We decided on black treads and hot pink risers. Yes, that’s right, hot pink. Sometimes I blurt out design ideas that I think Matt will never go for, and then he agrees and says he likes it. So, I do not ask twice. I go to Home Depot and purchase Behr Hot Pink and ROLL WITH IT! I wonder when this will come back to haunt me, like when Matt decides to acquire yet another bicycle, and I start to protest, and he says “Remember that time I said it was ok to paint the stairs pink?” yeah.

I finally finished up the last bit of painting this morning. I have now learned to never underestimate the amount of time it takes to do house projects. I thought that the weekend would be enough to accomplish this, but it took twice as long as anticipated.

I did all the pink risers first, starting from the top and going down. Two coats of paint for this part. I started with painters tape here, but quickly realized that was going to be worthless. There is nothing about our staircase that is even remotely smooth or at a right angle, so I decided that freehand was the way to go. Next, I did half the treads, skipping every other step, so that the upstairs would still be accessible by jumping over the dry stairs. Man, I am so smart. I had to box Bowser out for awhile with some furniture, he was really curious about what was going on, but the last thing I needed was him trying to charge upstairs on the wet paint.

Luckily, there were no incidents or accidents with the black paint, making me the first Wasilewski offspring to successfully paint the surfaces as intended, without destroying any carpet and/or requiring the use of a wet-vac to clean up.

Finally, I did the remaining treads yesterday afternoon and let everything dry overnight. Today, I finished up with white trim on the sides and also repainted the handrails. That was super tedious. I admit I had moments of skepticism as I was going along, but now that it’s done, I love it!!

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So last night we made some new artwork out of a cardboard shipping box. Not just any shipping box, but the coolest shipping box EVAR!! (You can see the full box here). The result is above, and it’s a welcome new addition to the walls. I enjoy switchng things up every now and again. So let me back up to explain, Matt gave me the red Eames elephant a few weeks ago as a graduation gift, and I love him. I named him Stanley. We were hoping that Bowser would take some sort of interest in the new, small animal living with us. But so far nothing, not even a cute bark or sniff or lick. Oh well. Stanley has not yet found a permanent location in our house yet, but for now he’s chillin’ on the kitchen table. Anyways, the box he came in was covered in those adorable little elephant sketches, and we couldn’t bear to throw it away, so we cut it up into pieces and arranged them into the frame we already had hanging on the wall. It’s like we’re the kids who prefer playing with the box over whatever actually came in the box. Well, not completely true, but close to it.

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Ok, so the daybed thing is together and in the backyard, and Matt added that awesome little trellis part. Now, I’m working on painting it green. There are a lot of surfaces on that piece, it’s like some sort of weird Escher nightmare trying to make sure I’m not missing any of the sides of the squares. I finished up the first coat between Sunday and today… so tomorrow I will tackle the second coat (fingers crossed that’s all we need)… and also fingers crossed for the weather to cooperate. It keeps calling for rain, then I race to get some done, then I scurry inside, then nothing happens.

Wow, ok, I just looked at that last photo and thought “weird/tacky beach bar” – anyone else getting that vibe? I hope not… I think it’s just the crazy combination of greens between us and the neighbor behind us.

As far as the cushions, thank you all for the advice, input, and the sewing offer! Sooo sweet. We did a lot of searching, and went ahead and ordered an outdoor cushion and Sunbrella cover, it took me forever, but I finally found a pretty reasonable solution for what we need. I’ll post some more pics when it’s all together.

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