Matt’s cardinal rule of home improvement is that everything takes five times longer than you think it will (you know, if you’re lucky). Today I made a grave error in judgement by ignoring this rule. It started simply enough: I was going to stain the handrail and newel post on the banister we had installed a couple of months ago. This part did not cause me a bit of trouble. The trouble came when I realized (for the first time with absolute certainty, although I had many a prior inkling) that natural oak is not a wood color that I wish to have in my home. I can certainly live with the natural oak stain on the floors in the main living area and just knowing that I plan to have the kitchen table and chairs refinished at some point in the future calms me considerably. I can even live with the unfinished pine hutches we have in our dining area and bonus room because in my mind’s eye they are already painted with a distressed black finish. Today, at approximately 3:00 pm (after having stained my beautiful handrail and newel post) I made the unfortunate discovery that I could not live with a natural oak handrail and newel post. The vision I’ve had for those stairs in my mind’s eye is something like this:
I think that’s even the same newel post that we have.
The first problem is that in order to stain the stair treads with a dark stain I need to fully remove the protective varnish. I did a little research and found a “green” stripper that is supposed to be safe to use inside the house and off I went to the Lowe’s. By 5:30pm I had covered the stair treads in stripper. The second problem is that that stripper now has to be removed. In order to do that it has to be scraped off and then wiped down with mineral spirits (or a “green” mineral spirits substitute, apparently). I have no idea how many rounds of this it will take to fully remove the stripper, but it’s obvious that it won’t be one. The third problem is that because the stripper isn’t fully removed and because I don’t want to burn my skin off I can’t kneel, lean, or sit on anything that has been stripped in my attempts to strip the tread above the one I have just partially stripped. The fourth problem is that the protective chemical gloves go up to the elbow and I still have huge leper-like poison-ivy-infested strips on both wrists and up my arms. Chemical gloves do not breathe. Huge leper-like poison-ivy-infested strips need air. The fifth problem is that it is currently 11:20pm and I only completed half the steps. While I write this my dear husband is scraping the stairs. He did not sign up for this, unless you count that whole for-better-or-for-worse thing…