Stairwell Transformation - Farewell Purple & Orange

The staircase to the 3rd floor was scary - bright purple and orange paint, broken black plastic treads,  and no handrail.  Wow, it was in need of a dramatic change.  Our first thought was to just paint it white (that's when I took this picture), but that seemed too stark and we weren't sure white was a great color for stair treads.













Sooooo....I did some searching online and Pinterest had some great inspiration (not on Pinterest yet?  Send me a note and I'll send you an invite!).

  

I decided to use a combination of a couple of these - two colors of stripes and stenciled numbers. But the key to getting the stripes right is for them to be perfectly aligned.   The eye wants to look for variation, so these stripes had to be straight and a uniform width, all the way up.  How do we do that?  Well, you could use levels and lines.  But, this is a great application for our new Bosch laser level (GLL2-40).   Of course it's designed for much more technical applications, but it really came in handy.   We set it up on our camera tripod and instantly had vertical lines to do our taping.

See the red laser lines that Robin is using?

The advantage to this design is you only have to tape once and then paint your multi colored stripes.My friend Robin Amorello (an incredibly talented Kitchen designer) offered to come give me a hand.  It was great having two of us as we set everything up on the stairwell.  

After we taped, we started painting.  It went quickly and before it dried, we carefully removed the tape.  This helps keep the lines cleaner and avoids pulling up the base layer of paint.

Two coats of paint

We let that dry overnight and I came back the next day and stenciled in the stair numbers.  What do you think?  I love it!  It jazzes up the steps and provides a little touch of whimsy.  I'm going to coat it with a couple coats of clear, water based polyurethane to protect it and then it's ready for traffic!

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