Sometimes in life, you just have to inhale and go for it. There can be no turning back.
Think of Eisenhower on D-Day, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or the nervous bridegroom, looking down the aisle and watching his soon-to-be wife and her father approach, arm in arm.
That’s how I felt when I finally — finally — ripped that worn-out brown carpeting off our stairs. I had no idea, really, what I was getting into. That’s been a month ago, and life has been upended ever since.
Our house was built during the nation’s centennial year of 1876. The upstairs consists of three bedrooms, one hall, and one bathroom. There’s another bathroom downstairs, but no bedrooms. So if you enjoy sleeping or getting dressed, you have to climb the 18 steps to the second floor.
We bought our house 30 years ago. We immediately fell in love with the beefy wooden newel post and all those lovely spindles, so old, smooth and varnished. But we hated the brown carpeting that was covering the stair treads. Someday, we said to ourselves, we would pull it up, remove the tack strips and refinish the wooden steps beneath.
Well, as they say, one thing led to another. Through the years, we painted and papered and sanded and refinished. We redid the kitchen and both bathrooms. We replaced a long-gone fireplace mantel. We installed storm windows and gutters. We hired roofers to install nice new shingles.
Our two daughters grew up, went to college, got jobs, moved away, married nice guys and got houses and children of their own. That allowed Laurie and me to focus again on that butt-ugly brown carpeting going up the stairs. We didn’t know what might lie beneath it, but we agreed that it had to go.
So, one day, while alone in the house, I sprung into action. With claw hammer, pry bar and utility knife, I started stripping the steps. It felt great to finally attack that worn-out mess. The carpet was secured by wooden strips covered in little tacks, which I expected. But much to my surprise, the foam padding had long ago disintegrated, forming 18 pockets full of dry, beige, sand-like debris. Out came the broom, dustpan and shop vac. What a mess.
Even worse, carpet removal exposed the middle two feet of each step, and 150 years of brown stain, darkened varnish, patches of ivory-colored paint and black adhesive used to stick down an earlier carpet runner. My heart sank. And sank. And sank.
Those stairs are the only way we can get upstairs. I knew that if I tried to remove all that gunk with chemical paint remover, some of it would end up on the soles of our shoes, and we’d track it across the nice wooden floors up there.
So I scraped and scraped. Then I sanded, by hand and with an electric palm sander. It was, in short, a long, hard, tedious, filthy, dispiriting job. And, since I had to sit on wooden steps and work sideways, a cramping, uncomfortable one, too.
Little by little, the steps came clean. Then came two coats of walnut-tinted gel stain. I coated every other step so that we could still get upstairs as the other nine steps dried. I stretched my long legs to avoid the wet steps, but Laurie had to plant each leg, then pull herself to the next step by gripping the bannister. Awkward, and a little painful at times.
At last, the end is near. The color match on the treads is looking good. Next comes two coats of clear polyurethane. That means more fiddling around, for sure, but at least it dries fast.
Finally, victory is near. I’m starting to feel like Ike when the Nazis retreated, Caesar as he headed toward Rome, and the bridegroom when the Most Beautiful Girl in the World smiled and said, “I do.”