33 Our Secret Stairs: Part 2

I haven't forgotten that you are all waiting for a stair update.  Truth.  They still are not 100% complete, however, I am excited to be stopping in today with an update.

And forgive in advance, I sit here by my lonesome typing up this post, while my husband gets credit for the work that has been done. I will do my best to relay his instructions, however, if you have any questions, feel free to ask within the comments and I will have him hop on for an Q&A session.

I last left you with this image:

Sooooo pretty!  Ha!  OK, maybe not yet, but it will be when we are done.  Two years of living with yucky stairs, we are excited to make them beautiful!

In the first post, we had extended the wall and cut off the lips of the stairs that we found under the carpet that was pulled.

The next step was to focus on the walls.  In all of the inspiration photos that I was most drawn to, there was a lovely white board and batten type wall treatment on the lower half of the walls.  We decided to follow that plan with ours as well, since there is very little natural light in the stairway and I wanted to do whatever possible to lighten things up.

As you can see, we pulled the old oak skirts since they were never properly installed and had been pieced together to go the full length of our stairs.  For the new skirts and the molding for the walls, we decided that MDF would be the route to go, since we could determine our exact cuts and measurements and also had plans of painting it all white anyway.  We used 4' x 8' 1/2" MDF boards and cut everything down as we needed.

My husband and his dad did all of the measuring and cutting of the skirt and top rails.  To determine exact measurements of the skirt, they measured off of the top and bottom stairs to ensure the skirt was a few inches taller, and then snapped with a chalk line.

All of the cut MDF was then installed with a brad nailer.

Then, they measured up from the stairs again to determine the height of the railing, and snapped the line again.

I often get asked about how we get projects like this done with kids.  And in this case, I was on kid duty, Bryan and his dad were on stair duty.  I popped in to check status and take pictures.  I must have been MIA for awhile, because when I checked in for status, they had installed the rail height molding and dad had skimmed flat the entire area with taping mud, in-between the skirt and molding {no way did I want the textured walls within the new wall treatment.  In fact, I don't want them at all... but I had to pick my battles}.

They let the newly flat walls dry and for a few days.  It was looking so much better already!

The next step was to attach the vertical MDF boards.  Here is a quickie diagram of what we were going for.

We wanted an even distance in-between the vertical boards, and approximately 3 feet wide "panels".  It took us a bit to figure it out, but it was important to note and measure the diagonal length of the vertical pieces vs. the width. The width of the board was 4", but the diagonal was 5", so it impacts the overall placement.

At the top, the board landed at the angle.

We ended with a full board at the bottom.

Once all of the boards were installed, we filled all of the holes with wood putty and used white painters caulk to fill all of the board lines against the walls.

And sanded it all down flat.

For the wall treatment, the color choice was white, so I used a piece of our lower level trim to have it color matched to Behr's paint and primer paint, in a satin finish.

It took three coats to cover well and evenly, but it was so worth it in the end!

At the bottom of the stairs, we went back and forth on the best way to handle how to end the wall treatment in the cleanest way.

We decided that creating a mini-panel would look best.

Here is a progression shot to show what a difference the molding made:

It was looking a bajillion times better, although it is so hard to see past those ugly stairs.  But oh how some new walnut stained treads changed that...

Stay tuned!

Pssst... the stairs are "one step" closer to finished!  See the installed and stained treads here.