Since we're talking dog years, it is very appropriate that our blog is seven (or one in dog years), and the topic of today's blog post just happens to involve one particular dog of ours. Our favorite female canine, Lulu, has been a member of our family for just a little longer than we've been blogging. She'll be celebrating her ninth birthday in a few months, and we've had her as a member of our family for just about seven and a half years.

Lulu has an affinity for climbing trees while chasing squirrels, throwing herself against the door when packages are delivered or a friend comes knocking, and generally guarding our home.

Like a seasoned veteran of the body-guarding business, she's honed her skills over the years. She covertly lurks, often appearing to nap, but her senses are always heightened and she's perpetually ready to spring into action to save the day. Evils such as letter delivery, or another dog barking a block or more away don't have a chance when Lulu is on duty. It doesn't even matter if she's upstairs, she'll make the mad dash down our wood stairs and leap towards the door at full speed!

Unfortunately, for our wood stairs, Lulu's skill as a guard dog has taken its toll. Lulu's nails apparently act as razor sharp talons when she's on the job, and years of her relentless pursuit of ensuring a danger free home have left their mark. Some might say she's neurotic, perhaps a bit over-zealous. Those people would be correct. But we love her nonetheless.

Back on January 31, 2003, just days after the stairs were refinished, before we'd even completed stripping the risers, our old home loving hearts were a flutter! 

A short time later (okay, maybe a long time later, like late 2004) we proudly proclaimed our stair and wainscoting project DONE!

But after seven and a half years of watching our stairs slowly transform from beautiful and pristine to clawed and chipped, we decided to do something about it.

Yep, that's what an overzealous 30 pound doggo will do to soft pine stair treads. 

We spoke with our favorite flooring expert (Roland from Royal Oaks Flooring) and he pointed out that the damage done wasn't as much to the wood, save for some scratches, but more to the finish. Her nails caused the poly to fracture and lift the stain finish right off of the treads, leaving exposed bare wood.

Since these stairs have been worn and sanded somewhat thin several times over the 130 years they've been in place, he advised not sanding them again, and instead staining the bare sections and top coating with poly to protect them. Then we can just call all of the scratches and issues a little bit of "character."

Armed with a plan, over the last week we've slowly taken care of this little issue of unsightly damage in an attempt to give Lulu a repaired launch pad for protecting our home. She anxiously observed our progress.

We started by lightly sanding all of the stairs to rough up the existing poly a bit. We also took the opportunity to lightly sand any of the exposed wood where the poly and stain had fractures. This was a quick hand sanding and I used some 400 grit paper, as I wasn't trying to take anything down to the grain and didn't want to leave any major scratches.

We started this process on just one of the stair treads to test the process, but ended up continuing it across the entire staircase once we knew it would work.

After sanding the poly and sufficiently roughing it up, we applied a coat of the Early American oil based stain to fill in any of the bare and scratches spots in the wood. Any totally exposed wood received direct application from a small application brush.

I made a mistake and went a little heavy, leaving it on a bit too long with the first step. That made the bare spots a little darker than they needed to be. After giving a shot on the first tread, I adjusted our approach and went a little lighter on the rest, which turned out better in the end.

Once the spot applications had been applied, we then spread the stain over each and every stair. This allowed us to get all of the nooks and crannies of anything missing.

After wiping away the stain and giving it an adequate chance to dry (we left it for 24 hours while we were out of town)...

...we started the long process of applying the poly. We used the same Bona semi-gloss oil based poly the floor was originally finished with back in January 2003. Luckily we took photos back then of the stain and poly the refinishers used. Today we were able to use that photo to ensure we used the exact same product, without any concern about conflict of recipe.

When it came to applying the poly we had to do a bit of a dance. Since we're living in the house the whole time we're doing this, we decided to poly every other stair with each coat. This would allow us to apply one coat of poly to half of the staircase each night.

We wanted to apply three coats (since it's such a high Lulu traffic area) to offer a bit more protection from fracture in the future. As a result, the whole poly adventure would take six days total.

This allowed us to precariously walk up and down the stairs for six days, skipping every other stair. Since Lulu doesn't know how to walk like this, it meant we had to carry her up and down, and barricade the stairs during the day. She didn't take too kindly to this setup (nobody puts Lulu in a corner).

Now that all is said and done our stairs look tremendously better than they did prior to our attempt at a quick fix. They certainly look far from perfect, but in many ways, that's perfectly fine with us. Our stairs tell a story. Lulu has lived in our home and has been part of our family for nearly half of the time we've been in this home. And while we've gone to great lengths to restore and care for our home, we've also enjoyed many wonderful moments living our lives in this home, and this just adds to the history.

We will likely add a runner to the stairs in the coming years, but this is a good temporary fix in the interim. We love the look of the wood stairs, but realize it may not be the most practical as Lulu gets a little older.

Looking back on our years in this home, and on our seven years of blogging, we've shared our projects and neighborhood with you and have truly enjoyed giving you all a glimpse into what makes DIY and Alexandria so very rewarding. Don't worry, we're not wrapping things up any time soon, and we look forward to sharing our various projects with you for many years to come. Some projects take a weekend, some take years to complete, but all are done with a level of care, enthusiasm, and enjoyment that add to the story of our family.

As we continue to gain experience and confidence in our projects, we'll continue to share the journey here on our blog. We may not post as frequently as we once did, but we hope the things we share offer some insight, encouragement, guidance, or just a little bit of fun that you can enjoy. Whether you've been reading along for many years, or just stumbled on some random post, thank you and we look forward to keeping you updated!

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How many times have we seen someone using pallet wood for their feature wall or coffee table? The idea is simple, but the statement in decor is impactful. You take something distressed and often seen as a castoff, typically used for shipping who knows what from some factory to a warehouse, and you rip it apart, sand it, scrape it, and eventually proudly display your creation in your home.

But now that we've seen the boom of practically free wood, we're faced with a DIY crisis. Yes, it's true, our love of all things character laden and weathered has led to the great pallet shortage of 2016. As a result, we're doing our part and joining in on the "downcycling" trend.

Following this new craze, what starts as this...

...when we're done, it ends up looking like this.

Pretty cool, right? Are you ready for the step by step instructions? Okay. 

Step 1, check the date. Ah yes, it's April 1, and this was our attempt at a little foolishness. 

What have we really been up to lately? Well, starting a whole lot of stuff without actually finishing anything. Unfortunately that's no joke. We're very close on having the downstairs bathroom project wrapped up and can't wait to share the final look, but that's still a weekend away. But what else is new? When it comes to April Fool's Day, I'd say we're often the fools in this respect. However, there's one project that's in progress I'd love to share with you today.

Our house's beautiful original staircase is one of the things that really sold us on the house. The chunky original newel post, heavy molding, and classic look sang out to us when we were looking.

We had great plans for the space below the stairs, but these plans had to change when we had our HVAC duct work installed. The air return needed to be nestled under the stairs.

Faced with a need for a design change, we had a few options. We could just put up some studs and drywall and call it a day, or we could build something with lots of trim and molding that extends the look of the molding and beadboard already on the stairs and looks like it's always been there. If you were a guessing person, which approach would do you think we'd take?

We started the process by building the wall we'll need regardless of our approach. A simple stud wall with a gap below the air return I can use for access to the crawl space.

But once that stud wall was in place, we were able to start on the design aspect that will make this look like it really belongs in the house. Specifically, creating a built-in bench we'll use for outside cushion storage.

Our goal here is to add a little interest under the stairs, and some storage too. We framed out an area that will act as our bench and if you squint really hard, you might be able to see the look we're going for.

One of the things that will really help this whole project is the fact that we have a large collection of salvaged beadboard in the attic of the house. It looks to have come out of one of the rooms in the house at some point, and it's just piled up in the attic storage area. We started to pull a few pieces out to see what we had to work with, and it looks like we'll have plenty of good pieces for the whole project.

Using a mixture of salvaged wood, new molding cut to match the old, and plain old stock pine or popular, it's my hope that this bench will be functional and will look like it belongs. We'll also be looking to use an old cast iron register cover for the air intake, and are thinking about possibly putting a small light in the area to add some additional interest. 

We'll have lots more on this project in the coming weeks as we're able to knock more of it out. We're really excited about this, and the hallway and staircase project as a whole. We have our work cut out for us for sure, but we're hopeful this center hall staircase will really become a highlight of our home.

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It makes me a little sad that we can't give you real time details of our first projects that we've already completed. Honestly, that is our loss but absolutely your gain, as our projects take FOREVER and now we can recap the interesting bits in a much more efficient manner. Don't worry though, we'll have plenty of other agonizingly long projects to recap. Come to think of it, we're in the middle of two or three as I type this.

The process of blogging about some of our early years' projects is also allowing us to relive some of our fond memories, which is a ton of fun. For instance, last night I said to Wendy, "Can you believe we lived with parchment paper on the stairs and a yellow extension cord running down the stairs for a year?" To which she responded, "I think I hate you." Love is in the air!

Yesterday's post covered our enthusiastic and almost giddy rush into the first several days of homeownership. We were excited and ready to take the world by storm renovating houses. We had three full weeks overlap living in our apartment while also working on our empty house. Our plan was to get as much done as we could, move in, fix it up, enjoy it, and move on. Like most first time DIY homeowners with a wreck of a house, we had absolutely no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

For one, we had made a commitment to strip all of the molding and doors in the house, thinking that would be an easy task. Given the seemingly endless layers of old paint from the last 100+ years, combined with the intricate details of the molding profile, well, it turned out to be a tall task that we are still working on 8+ years later. The picture below shows the profile of the mid-sized molding throughout our house. See the rounded portions and grooves all over the place. Paint just loves to goop and hide there.

Due to the paint stripping, the cracked walls, the need to re-plaster, the pull chain light, other projects, life, and the fact that we tackle many projects at once in spite of our understanding that we really shouldn't, the work on the entry hallway and stairs started in January 2003 and didn't wrap up until January 2005. That's a full 2 years for those of you scoring at home. Technically, if you count the fact that the entry vestibule isn't done, and I have a few items I'd still like to change on the hall, this project has actually taken longer to complete than our blog took to launch.

Once we had the carpet off of the stairs, and the stair treads refinished, we eventually shifted our focus back to the task at hand, and it was time for me to start stripping all of the molding I was talking about. And there sure was a lot of it.

Please note the pull string light, caked up paint job on the inoperable transom window, and the huge amount of work ahead. At least the transom glass was original and wavy. (Something I've yet to share: I heart wavy glass.)

This was our view up the stairs after the baseboards were stripped. You can see the paper on the stairs that I mentioned earlier. Yeah, I think it was actually on there for a full year. Also note the odd lack of molding around the doorway into the dining room. Something about this wide open space, giant doorway, and lack of molding was just plain wrong and boring...so we decided to fix it.

To correct this issue we turned to something that will undoubtedly become a theme on this blog, eBay.com. We found a wonderful leaded wavy glass window for about $30 (+5$ shipping). As you can see from the photo, it was in rough shape. The leading had been painted black at some point, someone had put silicon caulk around the perimeter of the glass for some reason, and the sash was falling apart.

I took it all apart, spent many hours cleaning it up with a razor and steel wool, and the end result was decent and fits nicely with our old house. That is one thing we learned right off the bat, if your work is close to perfect in an old house, it looks out of place. We really don't have a straight line or 90 degree angle in the house, so why start now?

Next up, we made a new piece of jamb to match the thickness and dimension of the old one (I've gotten a lot better at this now).

We then framed up a bit of an actual wall, and the opening for the soon to be installed transom window. This is one of those times where doing it "right" looked wrong. When I installed the transom ledge perfectly level, the leaning stairs made it look horrible. I actually had to lower the left side of the ledge to take it out of level and therefore make it look like it had always been there. Isn't that what they call character?

Here is the test fit of the transom in it's place. The main reason I used this photo was to highlight the infamous extension cord that we all grew to love. You can also see that I installed a door jamb in the doorway to the dining room so that we could put in a door casing so it wouldn't look so out of place.

After this, we focused on fixing all of the cracks and "re-plastering" the walls. I'll get much more into the plastering techniques we've adopted over the years in future posts. It has gone through several iterations, but this was our first attempt at it. Let's just say that there has been a lot of mud, dust, sanding, and swearing along the way.

We opted for a somewhat substantial crown molding for the hallway, and a matching but slightly smaller profile for the upstairs hall. The first floor ceilings are 10', so a heftier crown just looked more at home. Also in this photo, you can see the hinges we used for the transom. To this day, the side hinged transom frustrates me. This was back when we were noobs, and we were following the lead of another transom in the house with incorrectly placed hinges. At some point, I'll change this.

We searched and searched for a light fixture for this hall, and I had it in my head that we HAD to have a glass bell hundi lantern. I wanted an antique one so badly, but they are quite expensive, and were way out of our price range. This was also well before they were popular in mail order catalogs, so we just kept our eyes open. We spent our first anniversary in St. Michaels, Maryland, and Wendy spotted an etched glass hanging bell candle holder in a store window. It was not a lamp and wasn't electrified, but she looked at me with her knowing glance and said, "Can you make that into a light for us?" I cannibalized the old, hideous, brass lamp from the hall, added a little spray paint and some new wires. The end result, for under $200, is what you see below.

The light is honestly one of my favorite things in the house, and something we will absolutely be taking with us if we ever move. We also added a small plaster veneer ceiling medallion for good measure.

With the light hung, molding stripped, and the walls crack free and smooth as can be, we turned our attention to painting the hall. With the diamond shaped etched glass hanging lamp casting little diamond shadows on the wall, and the diamond like shapes in the new transom, Wendy thought it appropriate to do a two-tone diamond harlequin pattern. She felt it would give the entry that wow factor right when you walked into the house. Here Wendy is working on completing the pattern. We'll cover exactly how you can achieve something similar in a future post.

With the light hung, transom installed, new door casing, and walls painted, the hall was taking shape. The photo below gives you a decent side by side before and after. The dates listed are 100% accurate (before photo is of the previous owner's lovely decor) and are part of the reason why my wife has a perfectly reasonable excuse to loathe me long projects. Our end result is my chance at redemption.

We still had a ways to go until the new handrail on the stairs completed the project, but I'll cover that one in my next post.

So there you have it. My long winded detailed summary of a project that we started on day one. It may have taken way longer than expected, but I hope you'll agree that the end results were worth the blood, sweat and tears.

Now that I've come clean with our (first) never ending project, why don't you share some of your stories? Who has a partner than easily exceeds their time estimates by 10x, or constantly says it'll be done in 2 more weeks?

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Ick. Make that a double ick. From the "too tight of a squeeze" opening into the house, to the nasty pull chain light, all the way down to the filthy carpet on the stairs, our home was a creepy old man sporting a pocket protector and a bad toupee. And something needed to be done about it, pronto.

No sooner had we finalized the paperwork making it officially ours, we arrived at our new home, ready to make a dent in the ugliness that enveloped the property. We actually settled about two blocks from our house and had parked our car just outside our new front door, full of tools and ready to go. 

The toupee, a.k.a. bad rug, was first up on our list. Armed with a hammer and prybar (details on these tools can be found in this blog post), we quickly got to work ripping, pulling, and tearing up the rug and tack strips below. Despite the rough state, we knew we had a diamond in the rough, just waiting to be polished up. 

After applying the paste, the next step is to cover the paste with laminated paper (included), that is left on until the paint beneath it dissolves. If you run out of the paper, you can also use a standard roll of wax paper. The laminated paper is then removed with the bulk of the paste and paint adhering to it, and the stripped surface is washed clean.

• Strip baseboards.
• Priming and painting the newly stripped risers.
• Replaster stairwell walls.
• Coming up with an alternative for the existing handrail. Although semi-functional, our handrail just wasn't working for us. For one, it was installed in such a way that it was imposing in the already narrow space and often caught pant legs on the way down the stairs. Secondly, well, it was ugly.
• Adding visual interest to the stairwell via a salvaged leaded glass window.
• Renovating the downstairs hallway, to include stripping and repainting the orginal molding, replastering the walls and ceiling, adding crown molding, and the completion of a hand-done harlequin paint treatment.

We'll summarize it all in subsequent posts, as well as additional details on how you can accomplish similar projects in your own home. Do you think our first few hours and days of homeownership were spent wisely? Perhaps there's something you've done to improve the entryway of your home? Please share your tips and projects. We'd love to hear them.

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