PUTTING SOME PEP IN OUR STEPS

Over the next few weekends, we are both finally home, not traveling, and with no major plans – perfect for knocking one of our smaller home improvement projects off of our list!

As you may know, we own a multi-family walk-up in Chicago. The first floor is a rental unit, currently occupied by tenants, and we live upstairs. When you walk into the front door, you are greeted by a stairwell that leads to our unit. It is currently a combination of green, white and brown paint & the stairs are carpeted.

We are planning for the worst and assume that the wood beneath the carpet will not be the same, beautiful wood found on the landings. Naturally, we went to Pinterest for inspiration. Once we started browsing, we fell in love with the idea of painting the hallway white to brighten up the currently dreary space, and painting the stairs black to hide any imperfections – we assume there will be plenty.

Worst case scenario, we will add a runner to the stairs. But, finding a runner for these particular stairs is slightly more difficult than if we were looking to cover an indoor staircase. We and guests will be using this staircase frequently, often wearing shoes dirty from the harsh, Chicago weather. While we would love to use a beautiful, vintage, hand-woven rug, it just wouldn’t be fair to the rug (or our wallets) to do that.

We would likely have to go with a natural fiber runner, such as sisal or jute in order to deal with the wear and tear.

Needless to say, no matter which route we take, it will be a serious upgrade and we are excited to share our progress with you soon!

You can follow along on Instagram for more timely updates and Pinterest for more of our inspiration, but we will be posting about this completed project in the coming weeks!