The Cool House

The carpet shopping experience was not as awful as I feared. We only really liked one carpet, the most expensive naturally, but we knew it wouldn't go on the stairs so we picked four ones that weren't too bad and half the price and arranged to have samples delivered. A week later they arrived, and guess what? Yuk! So I got out the stain and experimented on one tread. I didn't think it looked too bad, but Steven still wasn't convinced. There was no way carpet was going down so I started the stair sanding process again, this time with steel wool rather than sandpaper. Eventually Steven took over and spent two hours on the job. Then I got to work with some dark stain and the more I did the better it looked. Three coats later the treads are a rich walnut colour and the risers white. It may not be professional but it looks way better than carpet. Eventually I'll get round to tackling the back stairs but I think it will have to wait until the New Year.
We have a more pressing problem to tackle this weekend: the huge Christmas tree that we thought would look great in the double height sitting room is so tall Steven can't reach the top even standing on our stepladder. So the choice is to leave it au naturel, throw the lights and ornaments at it and hope they stick or trawl round the neighbours and see if we can borrow an 8' ladder. Guess what we will be doing Saturday morning?