What a difference a year makes

Yes, a year. It took me a year to get this project done.  Sometimes projects are fun and they just roll on and are finished.  Sometimes not, and this was one of those times. As I was finishing the basement floor last year, I just knew the carpet on the steps had to go.  It was dirty, ugly, cheap and uncleanable.  Ripping it off was not a terribly easy task, but once I saw the first of it off, I ripped away.  Underneath was wood that was in decent shape, and the nose was rounded off nicely.  I knew it would be so much better painted. 

And it is.  It just took me a while to get there. 

It's not that the project in itself was hard, I just ran into issues along the way and got sick of it quickly. 

The first color I picked wasn't great, and when both the husband and the kid agree that it looks like throw up, you know it's not the one.  I finally got back to Sherwin Williams and picked out a nicer brown color: I used porch and floor paint per their suggestion, and am very happy with it. 

I'm not a neat painter though.  Trying to make nice lines between the white and the brown was a test of my patience.  Too much white on the brown; too much brown on the white; a painters tape fail (and no, I won't mention "blue or green", because I think it was user error!)

It is just OK.  If I was doing this for my main stairs in my house, it would have to be fixed.  But the reality is these steps are not well lit (hence no great pictures), and mostly small kids will be running up and down, and I'm sure they will not notice the issues.  I will, but I'm happy to move on to other things than deal with my perfectionist issues on this one.   The awesome result is that it's clean, spruced up, easily swept off and kept nice. 

So, for this one, stick a fork in me, they are done.