A Tale of Two Stairwells

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Our little 1908 fixer upper, as best as we could tell from records, started its life as a simple 2 bed 1 bath cottage. We’re not sure the history, but two doors down is a slightly older, bigger home that was built by a business tycoon around the turn of the century, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to wager that our house started out as an outbuilding, carriage house, or dare I say, BARN, of some sort on that property. So it was once a little single story thing that sat on a gently sloping lot, and at some point in the 60’s or 70’s, someone cut a hole in the floor, popped in a staircase, and put in two more bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs. Oh, also there’s a “laundry room” down there, too, but we’ll get to that later.

The “before” stairs were really quite special. They were definitely built without a level, and I’m also going to wager a bet they were built without any measuring instrument of any sort. The whole thing felt very eye-balled. They were stiflingly narrow, the ceiling was so low that my 6 foot tall husband would hit his face on it—HIS FACE, not just his head, and every. single. step. was crooked, sloped, and differently sized. The ENTIRE thing listed to one side, and when you walked down it, it was FULL funhouse effect.

So obvi the entire thing needed to be rebuilt. We even used a level.

In the previous photo, you can really get a sense of just how crooked the thing was. And every single step was a different height so if you weren’t really paying attention as you walked it, you would legitimately be tripping on the steps and ping-ponging back and forth between the walls. It felt like you had no equilibrium. IT WAS SO FUN.

On top of all this, we had more than one contractor come into the space and tell us that the stairs had “bad energy”. In fact, one demo guy patently refused to be near them. ALSO FUN. So before even moving in, we were like: great! We bought a haunted house. (Spoiler alert: we didn’t.)

The new staircase was widened by about a foot and yanno…built correctly with like…measuring devices and modern tools. And, because this is a little old 1908 house…er…barn? with pretty much zero storage, one of my main objectives with the entire reno was to squeak in clever storage wherever we possibly could. Therefore: staircase bookshelves. I like bookshelves. And this seemed like a good place to stick some. Plus, it has the added benefit of making the stairwell feel like it has a bit more room. And it’s also a convenient place to store cats.

The stairs lead down to the downstairs hallway, off of which are the two downstairs bedrooms, the guest bathroom, and the laundry room. “Before”, it was a lot of dark paneling and….terracotta tile floor. Because that makes perfect sense.

It is, unfortunately, a small, windowless area, but I think we managed to brighten it as much as we possibly could.

Another piece of original chicken art by Emily Reid def helps chase off those “bad stair vibes”, amirite??

Oh yeah—let’s also talk about stair railings. Cuz the wrought iron one that came with the house was a rickety, rickety mess. It was barely held on by exactly four screws. As it turned out, there were quite a lot of things not screwed in all the way. Including the deck off the back of the house….but we’ll get to that later.

Needless to say, we put in a much sturdier railing and hand rail system.

At some point, we even widened the upper railing so that it was easier for our cats to hang out on. Seemed like the right thing to do.

We had bare stairs for awhile, but ultimately decided that we needed some sort of runner to give more traction for the dogs. They don’t walk up and down them; they lunatic up and down them. And they need traction to lunatic. We went with a self-installed Dash & Albert runner and if you’d like to see how we installed it, take a look at this post. I absolutely love their rugs; not only for the design of them, but also the functionality. This is a cotton runner, which, when not nailed down to a staircase, is super washable (we have their rugs throughout our house) (also should mention they have awesome indoor/outdoor rugs, too), but they also hold up great on the stairs with vacuuming and occasional spot cleaning. They even hold up well to cat claws being sharpened on them CONSTANTLY. In my experience, they need to be replaced after several years (I believe we got five years out of the previous runner). SO worth it to have this cheerful pop of color and stripeage on the stairs. Also nice to not have the dogs slipping and crashing down the stairs. It’s the little things.

Cheers to functional stairs!

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