The stairs are one of the few things I do not have a before picture of.

The gist of it was that they were covered in the same dirty ugly carpet the upstairs was

and we ripped it up with the rest of the carpet with the intentions of redoing the stairs ASAP...

We bought the house last January.

In October Robert put in new steps where they wind:

And in November he sanded them.

Then they sat some more.

This area of our home has always been a slight embarrassment and eye sore.

It never really felt complete...

So I did what any reasonable wife would do: I gave my husband an ultimatum

"Either finish the stairs by the time we've been in the house one year (January 3rd 2015), OR I will hire the first person that someone recommends me and I won't care how expensive they are".

We had planned a new years party at the house so the deadline had to be moved up. 

Sure enough when we came back from Christmas with our parents he got his butt in gear.

We began by re-sanding the floors and cleaning them off.

We used a minwax pre-stain that was oil based

Then we picked up another minwax poly stain in Provincial

(we actually grabbed the last can of it... 

right before some poor woman came over and asked for it)

But one of those smaller cans (not sample) was enough for this project.

We also used some trim paint we already had from repainting the house.

Once everything was sanded and bought, we began staining.

The picture below on the left shows what the first coat looked like (ignore my "hot" pants)

The right shows the disaster that was my stairs during this whole process.

Robert was hard at work:

We had originally thought three coats would be the magic touch but we wanted them a tad darker:

After the 4th coat we were ready to paint the risers

You can kind of see how dark it got here:

We knew we wouldn't be able to match our hardwoods downstairs so we didn't even try.

I am also ashamed to say that the walls are still in need of another coat of paint from the move

So I will not be showing a picture from the top of the stairs until I figure that out.

Hope to get more projects done around the house in 2015!