Renovation - Stairs and Landing

Although not exactly a room I’ve still had to do a lot of work on the stairs and landing. They were originally painted a mushroom colour which made them feel very dark.

13th February 2006

I began by removing the carpet and the old bannister and then set about sorting the walls out. The stairs were polyrippled as the dining room and lounge were. This was a problem on the stairs as with them being narrow it was too easy to hurt yourself on the polyripple—it was course enough to actually take the skin off your knuckles as you were running your hand down the bannister (what were people in the 70s thinking?).

So, the question is how do you get rid of polyripple? Well, the proper answer of course is to get the room skimmed! Sadly I couldn’t afford to do this so I spent days on end grinding the polyripple off with a tungsten carbide grinding wheel and a power drill…oh dear. This made unbelivable amounts of dust and also left the walls looking pretty crappy. Still, at least they’re not actually painful now!

I also ripped off the strange fluted beading stuff you can see in the picture above which ran down the stairs and also around the door frames. I fit new architrave to the upstairs door frames and also made a new loft hatch cover.

7th May 2006

I glossed all the upstairs doors and fit new B+Q Black Iridium door handles all round. I replaced the uplighter on the landing with one to match the ones in the lounge and also fit a powerful halogen flood light for the stairs. With there being no natural light let into the stairs anywhere there were very dim before I fit the new light, but 200W lights them up like Blackpool! It may seem excessive but various people in my family have no night vision, so dark stairs aren’t a good thing to be around.

I painted all the stairs with Polycell base coat and then Johnstone’s Magnolia. Finally the carpet was fit and then it was all done:

26th November 2006