Stairs

We removed the carpet from the stairs.  Our plan is to paint the treads and put down a striped runner thus making it easier to clean the corners of each stair and only paying for the carpet where you actually used it.  Besides, striped runners on white stairs look very cool.

Fir stairs that squeak if you breathe on them

Most of the carpet is out.  You can still see the
original grey carpet on the upper set of stairs.

However finding striped carpet was challenging.  We asked our carpet guy and he kept showing us subtle sort-of stripes in non-contrasting colors.  They were more "stripe wanna be's" than actual stripes.  We wanted this kind of look:

We finally had to show the carpet guy a picture on the iPhone.  Then he got it.  The type of carpet we wanted was called "hospitality carpet" (think bad casino carpet).  If you do a web search for hospitality carpet, you will find a gold mine of patterns, swirls, optical illusions, tapestries, etc!  Fortunately our carpet guy also does hotel and industrial installs and had an entire room of hospitality carpet swatch books.  We settled on a fabulous black with multi-color stripes.  I can't wait to see it on the stairs!

In the meantime, we have pulled staples, sanded the edges of the each tread and riser, primed, and painted 3 coats of paint on the staircase.