Contrary to popular belief, we have been getting some DIY finished round these parts.  It’s just been difficult actually getting the pictures uploaded and posted on blog.  Ya know how life is.

At the end of this week, Rick’s family are coming for a visit.  They’re driving about 18 hours from Oklahoma to see us – it’s been about 4 years since we’ve seen them so it will be really nice to catch up.  His folks are bringing his five year old niece, Keegan (pictured here with her 18 month old cousin, Alyssa)…

So the fact that we haven’t got any railing on our main stairs is a bit of a problem. A safety hazard, to say the least. So with a definite deadline to meet, we’ve been spurred on to get the stairs finally finished.  After all, we’ve only been living without rails since last summer . You can track our progress here: stair sanding, new library header, the tread problem and finally, stair staining.

First up?  Before we can install any spindles and railing, we have to solve the base plate issue (read about that here). Rick has been working hard building custom landing plates. Custom because DIY stores don’t carry landing plates in the dimensions we need – 16 ft long by 10 inches wide, plus a little rounded overhang to make it all look pretty.  See exhibit A.

So we glued 1 x 10 to a 1 x 1, and routered then edge to create a bull-nosed finished (see Exhibits B, C and D). A little bit of sanding and screwing and we now have custom landing plates. Voila!

See those brown swirls on the edge of the steps?  We removed the wooden decorative spirals that were stuck there.  Nothing wrong with ‘em, just not our style.  So, those swirls will eventually be painted over for a more seamless look.

Next up? Drilling the holes for the spindles and staining the rest of the plates.  Deets coming soon – stay tuned!

Back in the summer, you may recall that Rick took it upon himself to dismantle the railing and sand the stairs.  You don’t remember?  Ok, here’s a (dusty) pic…

The plan was to remove the orangey pine color we inherited with the house with a richer, darker color.  He even tried a few stains out so I could see (I was in the UK at the time):

Fast forward a few months, it was finally time to try and get something done with our rail-less, spindle-less and stainless stairs. First thing we had to do was fill in the small holes left by the wooden spindles once they were removed:

All we had to do was cut small pieces of 3/4″ dowel rod and put them into the hole with a little wood glue.  We let the glue cure for about 48 hours, then sanded the steps to a smooth finish (sorry, no pics of this part of the process.  I did take some but someone who shall renamed nameless *coughRickcough* accidentally deleted them off my computer).  Anyhoo.

Then the staining begun.  You can see from the decor we did this right before Christmas

In this photo, you can see the filled-in spindle holes on each tread…

It won’t matter that they are a little darker than the rest of the stair tread.  The new wrought-iron spindles will be drilled in close proximity to these holes and each one will be capped off with ones of these thingymebobs…

Whaddya think? I’m loving the new darker stair treads.  They still need a light sanding and a second coat of stain, followed by some polyurethane so make them nice and glossy.  We haven’t 100% decided what to do with the stair risers yet – whether to keep them white, stain them the same walnut color, or even apply a subtle tile to them. What are your favorite treatments for stair risers? Do you have any inspiration pics you can share?