Watching paint dry....

Base boards (white) and first coat on the stairs (gray/blue). Touch-ups and walls once the stairs dry....

Cleaning up corners

Keeping "selling the house" in mind there are a lot of things I know that I, were I buying a house, would be viewed critically. The house is out-dated and there is not a lot I can do about that. Nonetheless, there are things that people would look at as "work" that might turn them away from the place.

These are also things that would make me happier if they were done, as well.

One of these is the carpet upstairs. Shudders. It was clearly put down (and put down securely) to cover up pine stairs and floors. There is no hope I'm going to find some gleaming oak floor boards under there. This was a pine and hemlock forest...not an oak forest.

The carpet they chose was very utilitarian. Good for kids, very very bad for cats. Cats should never have loop-style carpet. Just a few pulls make it look like crap. To the credit of the carpet, it took 5 years to start looking like crap, but now it really is awful.

However, what it hid is pretty bad. I tend to forget my place is a farm house. The outside looks it, but the inside has been re-done and most of the charming farm features have been ripped out or covered up. Here is what the carpet covered up:

Good old farmhouse stairs.

My mother gave me a brand new gallon of pale gray primer and a new gallon of paint, so I decided to re-paint the landing walls. I personally like the cheerful orange color, but I know it will freak a lot of visitors out. So I will repaint the landing gray, and the stairs a blue-gray (sadly, the stair paint I got is not as blue as I thought, but again, that's probably just as well, for the sensibilities of "normal" people). Until I can afford a runner that I like, I'm going to do something inventive with burlap that I saw online. I need something so three-legged Cricket has something to get her claws into, and also something that will help keep me from wiping out on the stairs.

I considered just leaving them bare, but I've already fallen down the stairs once. Should I fall down them again, I'd rather have something softening the blow. Maybe something like this. But that runner would be around $200 with shipping, and the burlap was only twelve bucks. So there you go.

Oh, here's something cheaper, with only two bucks for shipping, and around $100.

I think I have a $50 credit with Overstock.com anyway.

More later.