While I'm At It

Finally, it was me who was doing the waiting.

I started ripping up the carpet in our staircase in late November, weeks after DW and I decided that instead of replacing the covering with hardwood, we'd just replace the worn-out carpet. I stalled work in early December and didn't resume until this past April.

We put a down payment on the new carpet and were told that someone from the company would visit us, a few days later, to confirm the measurements, and we'd get a call when the carpet was shipped to the store and we could book a date for installation.

We waited a week between the home visit and a call that the carpeting had been received.

We weren't upset at having to wait nearly two weeks between ordering the carpet and having it installed. Far from it. Because while we were looking at the stairwell, now bare, we noticed that the walls were in pretty sad shape.

You see, they've never been painted.

I mean, they have paint on them but it's just the builder's white. Like quite a few places in our house, we never took the time to cover all of the original white paint.

"While we're waiting for the carpet to arrive," DW said, last week, "it might be a good idea to paint those walls while there's no carpet down."

I agreed. While I'm a pretty good painter—I worked in a paint store in my youth and used to teach people painting techniques—I'm not immune from getting the odd drip of paint on the floor. Working in stairwells has many challenges, and being able to paint without making a bit of a mess is near-impossible.

A week after ordering the carpet, with no delivery date yet in sight, we went to a paint store to pick a colour and figure out how much paint we'd need. DW had her ideas for colours while I had my own, and those ideas were very far apart: she wanted a shade of green; I wanted a light rust.

Off-white it was.

I started on Monday. I figured that it would take the day but, of course, it didn't. Home projects never seem to take a short amount of time for me anymore.

The first part to this project was taking everything off the ledge that runs halfway up the stairs, under the window. We have so many plants that fit that area and they've grown huge over the years, and weighed a ton to take down.

There's some water damage to the ledge where a bit of water had seeped in, but we didn't care: as soon as the walls are painted and the carpet laid, we're going to tile that surface.

With the plants gone, we next removed everything from the walls. We have a huge, square, canvas print that has faded to almost nothing. I'm going to give it to my mom, who paints, and she can reuse it.

We also have masks that we've collected from all of our travels, and they run almost to the ceiling to the right of the window. I had to get on a ladder to get the top half of them down, and I made the decision that I wasn't going to stand on this ladder to paint.

The last thing I need is to fall down the stairwell.

We have an extension pole and a goose-neck paint brush, so that's what I decided to use to paint the edges of the walls and around the window (the term is cutting). I've never cut with a brush on a long pole before, so it was a new experience. I used this technique for the cutting and would move to a roller for everything else.

Reaching with this pole, with a heavy brush laden with paint took its toll on my arthritic shoulder. By lunchtime, I needed a rest and I was only halfway through the cutting. When I returned to work, after lunch, I couldn't see where I had left off: apparently, we bought a near-identical white to what had been applied to the walls more than 26 years ago.

By the time I was done, the stairwell didn't look different, just cleaner.

It took two days to complete the stairwell. On the second day, I used a roller with the extension pole, and that was much heavier than when I used the brush, but I pushed through to get it done.

And just as I put the paint away, the flooring company called to let us know that the carpeting was in. If we liked, they could be over the next day to install it, but I told them to give us one more day because I wanted to give the walls a bit more time to set. It takes about 30 days for latex paint to cure but is dry in 24 hours.

I wanted to give at least 24 hours so that I could do any necessary touch-ups, which I actually had to do on one lower part. I didn't want them brushing against the wall and transferring paint to the carpet or themselves.

Today (Thursday) is the day that they lay the carpet down the stairs. Because I wrote this post the day before, I'm hopeful that they did a great job and our staircase looks amazing.

I'm planning to continue down the second-floor hallway with the same paint but I'm thinking I'd like to see some colour. Something warm.

Maybe, I can convince DW to go with a light rust. But certainly, no green.