They're done!
gorgeous stairs. finished stairs. shiny stairs. no cat-hair stairs. the first finished project that was not purely for survival (read: leaking plumbing, hand installing the recycled newspaper insulation). they are done! the only thing that went astrew with the last efforts was that my home improvement book (thanks auntie!!!) said "a great idea for staining or painting stairs is to paint first the left half of each stair and then the right". sounds totally reasonable, so we did this. unfortunately it left a dark line in the centre of every stair where the two sides overlapped. so we just layered on some more and went a bit darker than we originally planned. here are a few extra shots just to remind you how gross the carpet was, then how much fur, glue, tile and other crap there was, then what they looked like stripped without stain. the last one is also where the vacuum fell on my head while we were sanding. it hurt!