home improvement | Knitting In Flashes

The mauve (pink) carpeting has been on the stairs and two of the bedrooms on the second floor since we built the house in 1994. I never liked it from the get-go. The first floor is a lovely neutral beige. It needs to be replaced which will happen in the distant future.

See what I mean?

Granted the orangy oak wasn’t quite that pronounced at first and aged to that ugly color over the 30 years we’ve lived here.

I ran into some issues with the stain. The wood stair treads took the stain but the railing did not.

(I accidentally spilled some stain on the carpet in front of the door. Oops!)

After consulting with experts and expert-wanna-bes and messing around with this project for over a month, I finally found a solution with Minwax Polystain (not a paid review). The color is Espresso and I love it. I also decided not to stain the second flight as nobody goes up there and with the landing, it seemed like a good cutoff point. Plus it gave me less work to do.

To show off the darker treads, the risers were painted white.

The finished project with the new carpeting.

This has been on my bucket list for at least nine years! I’m very pleased with how this turned out. No more mauve carpet except for a few scrap pieces in the basement.

Got any big changes in your house?

I promised to expand on some of the events mentioned in my last post.

In February, I was knitting along on my Easy Mosaic socks when I (well, Mr. Aitch agreed) decided to host a family reunion AND anniversary party for us. We married in 1974 and wanted to celebrate the occasion with family and friends. I had four months to get it all organized, which (for someone who never planned much of anything involving more than two handfuls of people) got me into a slight panic.

The brass light fixtures over the breakfast table and island needed updating. Plus I wanted to get new carpeting throughout the house but first wanted to stain the stair treads on each side of the carpeting a darker color.

The new light for over the table was ordered. Mr. Aitch and I installed it in mid-March.

The light fixture over the island was installed in June. I forgot to take a before picture but it was just like the one over the table. I am not an electrician, however, we got both lights up and running without issues other than locating the correct breaker to turn the power off.