Home Improvement Extravaganza: Day 2

Yes, I know that today should really be day 4. Day 1 I spent catching up on housework; I spent most of last week in Minnesota for a class, plus it was time for some serious fall cleaning. I did some major vacuuming (including moving every piece of furniture), washed floors, and did piles of laundry. Fun times. I still need to go through my closet and get rid of clothes I no longer want, but that's a fairly quick and painless process.


Day 2 was my social networking day. I went out to lunch and then dinner with girl friends I haven't seen in ages. And after spending most of my work days and personal time with guys for the past few months, I seriously needed some female bonding!!

Yesterday I finally got to work on the stairs. I spent about 2 hours actually sanding, but maybe 3.5 hours on the project overall. This included 15 minutes breaks every half hour or so, since the respirator puts dents in my face otherwise. Still, it was nice not having sawdust snot afterwards. Even when I use a dust mask, I still manage to inhale quite a bit of dust. The respirator completely prevented dust inhalation. The stairway went from this:

To this:

And after I took that picture, I finished up the last two vertical bits at the top of the stairs, then started sanding the woodwork at the lefthand side of the stairs. I'm sure it has a name, but I have no idea what it is. I also sanded around the bottom of the newel post a bit to clean it up.

It's coming along, but slowly. Today my back hurts from all the strange contortions I have to make to be able to sand and see what I'm doing. If our stairs had been less solid, I'd have happily taken them apart. Thing is, the railing doesn't even budge when I lean on it, and I don't think I could put it back that way. So I'm stuck doing sanding yoga...

Today I'm feeling lazy. I'll work on the stairs in a little while, but I just don't want to.