It has been a crazy couple of weeks around here! First, we got hit with Hurricane Matthew, followed by record flooding. Schools were out for almost 2 weeks and many in our community are still without power or a place to call home. Thank to those of you who contacted me and donated…it really means so much!

Last week, Charles and I took a rare vacation and made our way up the Outer Banks. It was a much-needed break…but more on that later.

I know it’s not the official ORC day, but I just wanted to catch you up on our progress to transform the stairs and hallway.

If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge is an event hosted by Linda at Calling It Home and House Beautiful where 20 designers make over a space from start to finish in just 6 short weeks. You can catch those designers each Wednesday, and the rest of us link up on Thursdays. I did my first Challenge last Spring and my second last Fall.

To catch up on this project, check out my Week 1 post here. These stairs have seen better days. Like way better days. I vacuumed every inch of them, including the moldings and banister, and then scrubbed them with Murphy’s oil soap. And this was about as good as it got.

I guess that’s what 114 years of foot traffic looks like. So we called our “handy man” and he got to work stripping the top of each step, as well as the landing. Then he rubbed them down with varnish.

It’s gotta get worse before it gets better, right?

It looks sloppy in mid-process, but it actually looks pretty awesome. You can really see the grain in the stairs now. Next, they got started on painting the risers white.

So here we are after one coat. I’ll be back on Thursday to share week 4’s update. Just a little over 2 weeks to go!