Retaking the stairway
The first big project we tackled was opening the stairway from downstairs to upstairs. The house had been used as a 2-unit rental with separate entrances: they floored over the stairway upstairs and turned the space into a dining room area. From below, they just slapped a door at the base of the stairs, cut out the bottom-most step, took a sledge hammer to the walls and stuck a closet pole in there to turn it into a "functional" closet.
Before opening things up, we had to get the carpet off the dining room, which came up with relatively little fuss. There were zillions of staples holding the padding down (I'm still finding a few we missed here & there), but the hardwood underneath was in pretty good shape, and just needs to have a little refinishing (nope, haven't done that yet, but the floor is good enough that it doesn't bother too much, especially in light of what else needs to be done on the floors downstairs!).
Next, the downstairs team (we had friends JUMPING at the opportunity to deconstruct) drilled holes through the subfloor they dropped over the stairway through the oak hardwood floor so we could identify where the stairway was located. Upstairs we pulled the hardwood floor up as carefully as possible in the area we wanted to remove so we could salvage some to repair the living room downstairs. After all that was gone, the reciprocating saws were used from the upstairs to cut through the subfloor, and that was pulled out. Finally, the floor joists were ripped out with the saws: to secure the joists to the house frame, they just knocked holes in the plaster (and left them completely unfinished) and nailed away.
Ick. No bottom step. Old lath and horsehair plaster walls with big holes and cracks. No rails, no banister. When the house was originally built, the upstairs was probably unfinished, so the treads for the stairs are acceptable until you get to the point where you can't see their surface from downstairs, and above that the treads are pieced together from milled pine (I think). Oh, btw, it's a hairpin turn staircase, so there are funky treads at the turn.
Time passes as we save up money to hire someone to repair the walls and put in railing and banisters. We took out the left wall of the staircase (wall shared with the kitchen) because it was so badly mangled, and found live post-and-wire electrical lines! Fortunately the person we hired for the job had an electrician license, so he tracked the line down as far as he could & yanked it (it wasn't connected to any fixtures or outlets he could find, it was just kinda there). New drywall was put in, and a light fixture was added just at the base of the stairs to light the way (there had been a light bulb in a ceramic base screwed to the top of the old "ceiling" that came down with deconstruction).
The other wall wasn't too bad - there was a line of holes at the level of the subfloor from the joists, but rather than patching the plaster, oak trim stained to match the floor was placed over the holes. New trim to finish off the rough edges left by removing the floor was milled & stained to match the floor and put in. A new step was put in to replace the one that had been cut out.
Eventually an oak banister was put in, and an oak rail was installed upstairs to keep people from falling into the stairway. It's L-shaped and we'd hoped to have it connect to the bannister, but the height change and tightness of the turn was too much. A nice floor molding was added to the left wall to neaten the finish and take care of some fudging that had to happen due to the dimensions. One of these days a matching molding will be put on the right wall, but priorities...
After extensive negotiating, the stairs were painted a sandy tan, the moldings were painted white, and the walls were painted a medium grey and then ragged over in white.
All in all, it took us a day to rip open the floor, a couple of years to save up for the repairs, a week for the work to be done by the worker we hired (working part time - he had a 'real' job too), and about a week for me to do all the painting.
(hopefully I can get a picture here but I'm not HTML savvy enough to do that right now)
Before opening things up, we had to get the carpet off the dining room, which came up with relatively little fuss. There were zillions of staples holding the padding down (I'm still finding a few we missed here & there), but the hardwood underneath was in pretty good shape, and just needs to have a little refinishing (nope, haven't done that yet, but the floor is good enough that it doesn't bother too much, especially in light of what else needs to be done on the floors downstairs!).
Next, the downstairs team (we had friends JUMPING at the opportunity to deconstruct) drilled holes through the subfloor they dropped over the stairway through the oak hardwood floor so we could identify where the stairway was located. Upstairs we pulled the hardwood floor up as carefully as possible in the area we wanted to remove so we could salvage some to repair the living room downstairs. After all that was gone, the reciprocating saws were used from the upstairs to cut through the subfloor, and that was pulled out. Finally, the floor joists were ripped out with the saws: to secure the joists to the house frame, they just knocked holes in the plaster (and left them completely unfinished) and nailed away.
Ick. No bottom step. Old lath and horsehair plaster walls with big holes and cracks. No rails, no banister. When the house was originally built, the upstairs was probably unfinished, so the treads for the stairs are acceptable until you get to the point where you can't see their surface from downstairs, and above that the treads are pieced together from milled pine (I think). Oh, btw, it's a hairpin turn staircase, so there are funky treads at the turn.
Time passes as we save up money to hire someone to repair the walls and put in railing and banisters. We took out the left wall of the staircase (wall shared with the kitchen) because it was so badly mangled, and found live post-and-wire electrical lines! Fortunately the person we hired for the job had an electrician license, so he tracked the line down as far as he could & yanked it (it wasn't connected to any fixtures or outlets he could find, it was just kinda there). New drywall was put in, and a light fixture was added just at the base of the stairs to light the way (there had been a light bulb in a ceramic base screwed to the top of the old "ceiling" that came down with deconstruction).
The other wall wasn't too bad - there was a line of holes at the level of the subfloor from the joists, but rather than patching the plaster, oak trim stained to match the floor was placed over the holes. New trim to finish off the rough edges left by removing the floor was milled & stained to match the floor and put in. A new step was put in to replace the one that had been cut out.
Eventually an oak banister was put in, and an oak rail was installed upstairs to keep people from falling into the stairway. It's L-shaped and we'd hoped to have it connect to the bannister, but the height change and tightness of the turn was too much. A nice floor molding was added to the left wall to neaten the finish and take care of some fudging that had to happen due to the dimensions. One of these days a matching molding will be put on the right wall, but priorities...
After extensive negotiating, the stairs were painted a sandy tan, the moldings were painted white, and the walls were painted a medium grey and then ragged over in white.
All in all, it took us a day to rip open the floor, a couple of years to save up for the repairs, a week for the work to be done by the worker we hired (working part time - he had a 'real' job too), and about a week for me to do all the painting.
(hopefully I can get a picture here but I'm not HTML savvy enough to do that right now)