From Drab To Fab: Our Stairway Makeover
- Mathieu O'Brien
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
When my wife and I moved into our mid-1970s townhouse, many of the rooms and spaces stayed in the 1970s. Lots of browns, beiges, and oranges, which made for an overall yellow living experience, which isn't our aesthetic.
After passing the front entrance to the house, one of the next things you see is the stairwell leading to the upper floor. So, right away, lots of beige and orange, and the browns come in when you reach the upstairs, when you see the doors and trim.
Well, given that this space is pretty central in the house and that we pass through it all the time, we felt it had to be updated sooner rather than later.
The first step was to tackle the stairway railing. The vertical metal bars had been painted over with a beige, presumably to match the equally beige walls. So, we got to work by using old paintbrushes to apply a paint stripping chemical to the beige area. We gave the paint stripper some time to work its magic, and after a while would use wire brushes and scrapers to remove the paint. We had to do this a few times, and eventually most of the paint was removed. What remained was stubborn paint that would only come off if we grinded it with a rotary tool kit.
Finally, the railing was ready to be repainted. If we could, we would have kept the metal unpainted, but due to the grinding, and tiny beige specs that remained, we couldn't save the original black colouring. Instead, we got black paint specifically for covering metal.
It looked great!
Okay, what's next?
Let's get rid of that orange-brown from the doors and the surrounding trim.
This was simple, just had to be patient between paint layers. A few layers of white paint later, and the trim and doors were all white, which really brought new freshness and brightness to the space.
Great progress so far. Just one last teeny tiny step left... the walls.
My wife and I really like more classic-style house elements from the Victorian era, such as wainscoting, molding, etc. Not to say that we're against modern elements either. Our style is a mixture of both, and so, we felt this stairway and upper landing space would be a nice spot for a simplified version of this aesthetic.
We wanted a two-tone colour scheme, that being a white lower third and a bold dark blue top section.
We measured the height of the stairway railing to be three feet high. So, we painted the white section to go past this height. It'll be easy to cover the white with the blue later on, so the overlap made it easy to apply the white section.
Once the final white layer went on, we could put down a three-foot high line of painter's tape, to give us a clear line for the blue area.
Then we painted.
It was a lot of painting.
You don't realize how much there is to cover until you start. Only then does it hit you how tall a stairway ceiling gets. To the point that, as my wife was doing the cutting along where the wall meets the ceiling, it was too high for her to reach, and too far over for the step ladder to help either. We had to use the next logical solution: I stood on the steps as she stood on my shoulders to reach the unreachable area.
What's the problem? Made sense to us, and it worked!
Anyway, bit by bit, the vision came together and finally, after many blue layers and many hours, the painting was done. All that was left was to add the painted white trim to create a clean delineation between the blue and white.
This was a little tricky. Overall, it was simple stuff; cut the piece to length, ensure it was level, and tack in a few finishing nails. The tricky part came in when we reached the stairs and had to match the downward angle. You know when you have a problem that, generally speaking, is simple, but it's just not something you do all the time, so you start to overthink, even though the simple way to do it is right there? Yeah. So, we may have messed up a little bit on the initial angle, but the second one was fine. To fix our small error, we were able to reuse a small offcut and wedge it into the gap. A bit of adhesive, paint, and some patience, and honestly, you barely notice it.
And that's it! After about a week's worth of work (lots of waiting for paint to dry), our stairway and upstairs landing got a full makeover. It feels much nicer to be in the space, and adds some interest to an otherwise flat and uninteresting area of the house. Yes, it's still just a passthrough space to get to various rooms, but now it feels more modern and dare I say, a little luxurious?
Well, that's all for this project. I hope this shows how a few simple decisions can completely change a space, and I hope this inspires you to tackle that drab area in the house and make into something with more life!
As always, thank you for reading.
Comments