Happy Friday friends!
It’s hard to believe but next May, Mark and I will celebrate not only our 20th wedding anniversary, but also 20 years of owning homes. Some of our house-to-home projects we’ve hired out to professionals, but many, many of them we’ve tackled ourselves, especially in the last few years since we moved to our current diamond-in-the-rough.
As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. We’ve learned a lot along the way and while there are many things we are thrilled with, there are of course a few things we would do differently today. Literally every time I vacuum I think about how I need to start sharing some of these on the blog. The DIY life is fun, it’s gratifying, but it’s also a LOT of trial and error and figuring things out on the fly! I want to share with you not only all the projects that have turned out great, but also the mistakes we’ve made along the way. If I can save but one person from a decorating disaster……I will have done my job here 🙂
And you know how I love to have friends over here so you’ll be seeing a few other bloggers’ mishaps here and there too. We’ve all got a few regrets!
So here we are! Frank’s regrets might have been too few to mention, but I can’t say the same for me!!! A brand new Sinatra-inspired mini-series:
This is where the every-time-I-vacuum-I-think-about-blogging comes into play. Our foyer stairs. OY VEY. Here they are at our inspection 6 years ago.
I ripped off the runner, pulled out all those stinkin’ staples, and painted the risers and spindles which made a huge difference.
A few months later I stripped the treads with the plan to refinish them to match the rest of the hardwoods in adjacent rooms. After I stripped them though, a few of the treads were REALLY badly discolored – I couldn’t even sand it off, it was so deep. (The former owners apparently had a lot of pets, but they peed on the stairs????? Eww.)
I had already stained the railings dark and we loved them, so I decided to go with a dark stain on the treads to disguise any discoloration, and OH WE LOVED THEM DARK!!!!!
Oh my gosh, right from the start, they totally changed our boring, cookie cutter house!! The stairs were so dramatic and a little different than every other house on the block. Soon after, I installed board and batten to the foyer walls and although we still had our ugly 80s tile going on (and oh yes, the baloney countertops and old linoleum floors in the distance!), the foyer looked worlds better than were we started.
Even though they were a contrast to our natural red oak floors I thought it all kind of worked.
(my living room about 100 versions ago before bookcases and black doors!)
BUT THEN!!! It didn’t take long to realize the dark stairs were going to be high maintenance. They NEVER looked clean. Every bit of our dog’s fur had some kind of magnetic pull to the dark treads, despite the fact that he never ONCE went upstairs in this house (our big St. Bernard wa+s terrified of stairs 🙂 ).
Cue the DIY seagrass runner installation, both to cut down on the fur and dust all all over the steps, and because, well, seagrass. I love it. (And by the way, no regrets there – I talked about how it held up here and it’s still going strong!)
BUT YOU GUYS. Our pup has been gone now for 2 and a half years and I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that still the stairs haunt me.
Even when my house is super tidy and clean and vacuumed, the sides of the treads and the landing…..they need to be dusted. DUSTED! On the daily would be optimal but it’s more like once a week and by then, it looks like this:
I love them, and I despise them.
I like a clean house like anyone else, but I don’t want to be a SLAVE to it. High maintenance, gah.
And I am oh so grateful that we didn’t do our floors yet, because this little lesson has taught me that I could never, ever live with a whole house of dark wood floors, whether they are ebony like my stairs or medium-dark stained like I talked about doing in this post.
Do you have dark wood floors and if so, are they the bane of your existence or do you love them still?
As Thomas Edison said,
I HAVE NOT FAILED. I’VE JUST FOUND 10,000 WAYS THAT WON’T WORK!
More disasters and mishaps to come because regrets…….I’ve got a few!
Happy weekend my sweet friends!! Hope it will be free from stair dusting and full of fun!!
