We can do it. We know we can. It's our house, dadblammit!

I have to rant today...I hope you don't mind.  You see, I dislike wall to wall carpeting.  I'm sorry if you love it.  That's okay.  I'm good with everyone having their own pet peeves.  But I have kids.  And I watch kids.  And all of those kids are always running around getting things dirty.  Yay!  That's what kids do...I know.  ;)  I like them to run around and have fun and not have to worry if they forget to wipe their feet or remove their shoes.  They're so busy they don't always remember all the little rules we adults ask them to follow. 

SO.  Why would we cover our floors with a wall to wall dirt magnet?  I just don't get it. Not very smart or practical when you need to clean.  I'd rip up all of the carpeting in our home right now and replace it with something like hardwoods if I could afford to.

But I can't.  That would be crazy. 

Who does that sorta thing?

Well, we do...dadblammit!  It's our house and if we just can't take the carpet anymore, well, we can rip it out and be done with it.  Starting with the stairs!  Even if we don't have the money for hardwoods! We're kinda crazy like that.  :) 
Here's what our staircase looked like after the nasty carpeting was ripped free:

No hardwoods under the carpet.  :(   Not even plywood...we weren't that lucky.  Just some funky chunky particle board type stuff.  My Honey calls it USB.  (He has a different word for everything, as he told us ladies this morning when we were trying to discuss how to deal with the huge gaps between the treads, risers and walls.  Apparently we don't speak the same language!?  It's a Mars and Venus thing.)
Do you see what else was under the carpet?  Carpet strips, staples and a whole lotta dust and grit.  YUCK.  IT WAS TIME FOR THE CARPET TO GO. 
 So the MARS GUYS ripped off the carpet strips and pulled up the staples.  Then I swept up the mess and vacuumed up a decade of dirt...

And started to paint!  I decided going from the top down would be the most practical.  Otherwise I'd be stuck upstairs while the paint dried.  The young Martian decided he wanted to hang upstairs and play his PlayStation when I mentioned we could use a bucket and rope to get snacks up to him.  Hehe...that left me downstairs alone for hours.  Shhhh...

 But I did remember to feed him from time to time.

 And I painted the stairs with blue-grey paint.  Semi-gloss.  Right over the chunky "USB" treads and risers!

After chatting with my friend, we determined that a wide blue stripe up the center would look really nice and tie in the blue from the living room.  I decided to wait on that since the little guy needed to make it downstairs for dinner at some point.

But here the stairs are in all their gappy, particle-boardy, blue-grey painted glory.

'Nothing a little caulk won't fix'...right HONEY???

That blue stripe's gonna look mighty fine on these!  LOL.