[AD: this post contains gifted items.]

Well, folks, it’s taken four months, plus every last shred of sanity I possess, but, at long last, I’m happy to say that our stair remodel is finally DONE.

Honestly, I think I’ve said more than enough about this particular project over the last few weeks months, so this time I’m just going to go straight to the photos, and let them do the talking: for those of you new to The Stair Saga, meanwhile, you can read part one of the story here, and my DIY diary here. Oh, and some tips on how to survive two solid months of DIY, too. Wow, I really HAVE been going on about this one, haven’t I? Well, here’s the finished result: and also my cheesy smile when I realised it was FINALLY done…

So! When we first started this project, back in the days when God was a teenager, and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, our downstairs hall looked like this:

So, the stair was dark, dingy, fully enclosed, and with an old beige carpet that wasn’t quite as scruffy in real life as it looks in this photo, but which was pretty scruffy, to be totally honest. Good things were going to happen, though, apparently, and so it came to pass that just several lifetimes later, and at great cost to our combined mental health, that hall now looks like this:

Oh, and don’t worry: good things are still going to happen – they’re just going to be happening on the opposite wall from now on:

(The giant canvas was courtesy of Photowall Sweden a couple of years ago.)

Knocking down the wall was the first – and easiest – step here: it was finding something to replace it with that was the problem. We always knew we wanted to use reinforced glass here, to let in as much light as possible, but it proved a little bit tricky to find someone willing and able to provide it for us. Eventually, though, we found a local glazier who was able to help, and while we were waiting for the glass sections to be made and delivered, Terry cracked on with removing the carpet, and replacing it with laminate flooring:

I mean, I say that as if it was some kind of quick, easy decision. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, though, you’ll know there ARE no quick or easy decisions for us, so, naturally, we agonised over this one for an annoyingly long time. I’d initially been hellbent on having an all-white staircase – purely because I’d seen one on Pinterest, and that was that, basically – but was eventually forced to concede that, although the white flooring we have in two of the bedrooms has proved to be really low-maintenance (Yes, really…), it might not be QUITE as practical for a high-traffic area like the stairs.

Terry, meanwhile, wanted a natural wood floor with white upstands, and he was totally set on that right up until he took up some of the stair carpet, and discovered that the floorboards underneath were the kind of cheap MDF you tend to find in newer houses (No gorgeous floorboards for us, sadly…), and that replacing them with real wood would basically involve taking down the entire staircase. Well, we may have been willing to live without walls for weeks on end (I mean, we weren’t really: we just had no choice…), but there was absolutely no way we were prepared to take down the stairs, so we did a bit of research (And by “we” I obviously mean Terry….), and were happy to discover the Quickstep Incizo system, which allows you to install laminate flooring on stairs.

(Just because I know I’ll get a lot of comments about this, yes, we did think carefully about the wisdom of having glass walls in the home of a sticky-handed toddler. We decided just to go for it, though, because Max is never allowed onto the stairs or landings unsupervised, so there shouldn’t be too many opportunities for him to touch the glass – er, other than this opportunity right here, obviously – and, of course, he’s not going to be a sticky-handed toddler forever, either. Ultimately, though, we’re aware that it will get marks on it, and we’re just going to have to live with that: I mean, it’s not like I don’t already spend 80% of my time every day cleaning fingerprints off all of the mirrored doors (Which I ALSO hate with a fiery passion, by the way…) and other glass surfaces in the house, after all, so what’s one more surface to clean, really?)