Stair Master

When we moved into our house a little over 10 years ago, most of the house was wall to wall with off white shag carpet.  Even the bathrooms, which is a really gross Midwestern tradition.  Which with four kids, and not to be sexist, but especially two boys (really, think about how good a boy's aim is as a toddler) makes me want to vomit.  As did ripping out all the noxious dog pee stained carpets from the entire upstairs because our dogs would get really pissed off when we left the house.  Literally.  Now, only small sections of carpet remained in the boys' rooms and the stairs.  And it had to go.

Before

One fun thing about me is after I procrastinate something for a really long time and then finally decide to do it, it instantly becomes an emergency.  And it must be attended to immediately.  To quote Chaucer, "Time and tide wait for no man."  I don't know exactly what that means, but I hope the tide part means my dogs are done pissing on my floors.  Because I'm the one who's been their bitch cleaning that shit up.  Oh, cause sometimes they shit on the floor too.

Kids and dogs are gross.

I called my husband at work.  "Can I rip out the carpet?"  Now, my husband is a very smart man; he knows that's not actually a question at all.  It means,  "heads up I'm going to rip out the carpet now".  And he also knows that he'll be fixing whatever I screw up, because he knows I'm truly gifted at screwing things up.  So, with a box cutter in one hand and a set of pliers to pull out the millions of staples used to affix the carpet to the sub floor, I was off.  But, I must confess, I'm always a bit off.

When all the carpet was finally gone, and only a heaping pile of dirt remained, it was time to fill all the holes left by the staples and then sand the stairs smooth.  And then paint.  Only to realize I did two coats of white paint that actually attracts my dog's black fur.  What was I thinking replacing white carpet for white paint, anyway?  So, I went back to the paint department at Home Depot yet again, where I'm pretty sure the paint guy thought I was really into him.  When I was really just into choosing the wrong paint.  Apparently.  Until I finally found, Mr. Right.  A high gloss paint with commitment issues, so it repelled dog fur.

Unfortunately, it doesn't repel shoe prints.  Or undecipherable blobs of food.  I mean, who eats on the stairs?  Ok, that was a stupid question.  Teenagers do.  Because they eat everywhere.  Do you know what else teenagers do?  They go down the stairs with purpose.  And by that I don't mean they go down to retrieve their pile of laundry I've folded for them to put in their dresser.  I mean, they put all of their body weight into essentially a fast and furious pseudo-controlled fall down the stairs that sounds a lot like machine gun fire.  My house is a war zone.

Ironically, we needed a carpet to cushion the blow.  

This sounds like the fun and easy part of the project.  But, when you're doing a home improvement project, you realize, there's no fun and easy part.  It all just really sucks.  Because after looking at every carpet store in town, you won't be able to find exactly what you're looking for.   Then, you'll start looking on the internet.  Where you won't be able to find exactly what you're looking for either. Because you can't always get what you want.  But, if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.  (I may have plagiarized those words.  But, is it really plagiarizing if everyone knows the source?)  Finally, after two months, and finding someone to install it, it was finished.

I am the Stair Master.

And by that I mean I get my exercise going up and down these stairs to nag kids to come get their neatly folded laundry and actually put it in their dresser and not throw it on the floor.

After
Now, how long until the kids & dogs destroy it?

(Somehow I didn't majorly screw anything up.  As long as you don't look closely at my paint job.)