New Oushak on the Landing

Thank you all for the kind words about the studio reveal! I hope all of you have entered the $2000 give away! I'll be posting more info and sources and angles of the room soon. :)

While I'm working on those posts and tutorials, I wanted to share this pretty rug find with you! My friend Kendra Smoot tipped me off to an eBay listing for this beautiful little Oushak rug (what a friend, right!?). I think I got it for just over $100 and I love how soft and worn it is. It's slightly overdyed with blue and pink pastels. So pretty!

Right now I have it on the landing by the girls' rooms. It fits the floor space perfectly up there. It might end up moving around to one of the other rooms, but I love it here for now.

There's a lot of black happening up there with the stairs still being bare and all the pretty but dark black doors. I think the rug helps lighten things up.

I have the little scalloped secretary on the landing still, but I've yet to decide if I'm going to paint it or leave it as is. I'm leaning toward trying to paint it or doing a limed/cerused finish on a dark base. I think it would look so pretty if I could pull it off!

I put some art up in the landing too. I've had this very naive painting for a couple years now and it always feels like it belongs in the girls' space. I think it's sweet and I love all the bright pops of colors. The frame was pretty lame though, so I painted out the faux gold glaze with some Gentleman's Gray paint I had laying around, which is a deep, soft navy color.

I leaned the painting against my framed button collection that I made a few years ago using buttons I inherited from my grandmothers. The twisty concrete planter was a more recent project.

Anyway, I'm loving my new Oushak! It makes the landing feel like an actual room! :) Makes me also want to put a little bench up here against the stairs. I also need to pick a flush-mount light for the ceiling, and I really need to finish up the stair runner. 

PS if you're looking for a Oushak on eBay, always sort the listings by lowest price first. The private seller listings will almost always be auction style and not Buy It Now.

Black Stairs and a New (Old) Rug

ugh! must find a new light fixture soon!!

Things are starting to shake out in our foyer! Some of you hyper-observant readers noticed the new black stairs peeking out in one of the photos in this post (or maybe you just saw my teaser on instagram). And, best of all, my favorite new rug from eSaleRugs arrived over the weekend. Happy Thanksgiving to me!! Isn't it gorgeous??

So, about the stairs. I liked the gray paint color okay, but I kept wishing the color was darker, especially as I was picking wall colors and was leaning toward the Brushed Aluminum color, which is a little darker than I was originally planning. You can see my test color here on the wall under the railing by the vent. The gray on gray was a no-go. So I pulled out my gallon of Onyx that I've been using on doors and the fireplace and tried a little bit on the stairs. It was obviously the right choice. I asked the painters to add the stairs to the bid and they didn't charge me much more than the cost of paint (nice!). It made sense to get the stairs finished while the painters were here when this part of the house was sort of out of commission anyway. Also, I don't really regret all the work I did before with the gray paint color because in the end it actually helped me lean more toward the darker gray on the walls. And most of all, all that filling and sanding needed to happen regardless. So you know, whatever. All's well that ends well.

And I really do love how the stairs turned out. The contrast is so pretty against the lighter walls and floors. And the railings are far and away less 80s to me in black.

The only downside is the dusty footprints have been killing me, so I moved up finding a runner on my to do list. You might have seen that I found this rug at Homegoods a week or two ago. I liked the colors and the small repeat on the pattern will make installation SO much easier, and will help to hide dirt, but I wasn't totally sure it was the right choice.

Until I found a new old rug for the entry.

It's a 100 year-old Shiraz Persian rug from my favorite rug source, eSaleRugs. I've purchased half a dozen rugs from them in the past few years and every time I've been thrilled with the rugs in person. I got Abbey's bedroom rug from eSaleRugs, the runner I had in the kitchen in our loft and the long rug I kept in the garden level entry at the brownstone. They're like priceless little treasures to me. So unique and so beautiful (and all of them were so affordable - less than the cost of a new rug at West Elm). This rug is 4.5x9.5' and it cost about $350 with free shipping.

I love how the dye colors are sort of all over the place. The reds and pinks and oranges in the medallions are so pretty! And that inky blue stripe in the black background? Be still my beating heart.

The two rugs are perfect together, don't you think? I feel like an older patterned rug brings soul to a space and that's exactly what was missing here with the new runner.

Anyway, I'm super happy with how things are starting to come together! We're going back up to my parents' on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, but we'll be back earlier in the weekend and I want to spend some of our down-time hanging art in here and in the living room. I think we'll have ourselves a comfy home just in time for Christmas. :)

How I Painted My Stairs

I've decided I definitely want to change the stairs (treads, banister, balusters - everything) down the road a bit. But for now, I knew it made sense to just paint what I've got. Most of you agreed that I could change the look enough with paint that it would be worth the time and effort.

Well, there was definitely time and effort spent! And I'm pretty happy with the change the color makes in the space.

I think it will be worth all the effort in the end, once the runner's installed. The hardest part by far was all the sanding. And thank goodness for Bondo!

Bondo is one of those products that might look intimidating, but is actually pretty easy to use. You mix a hardening cream with the epoxy base putty in small batches and then smear on the mixture quickly before it starts to set.

The stuff stinks bad, but it works miracles and fills any hole/crease/crevice/seam you present it with.

After the Bondo had dried for a few hours I sanded the filler down. This was seriously a full day's work. Every tread took about an hour. But by the time I was finished, the Bondo had perfectly sealed all the imperfections and all the hand-scraped detail on the old wood had been sanded away.

Michael helped me hang plastic sheeting on the walls and we wiped everything down twice.

I used my favorite Critter sprayer to paint the stairs with the first coat of tinted blue-gray primer.

And some of the imperfections started to reveal themselves.

As Linus would say - Ruh-ro.

So I caulked and did another coat of Bondo where it was needed and then sanded the whole thing again. (and sniffed and sneezed and coughed the whole time - stupid cold.)

I sprayed a second coat of primer on and then the first of two coats of Benjamin Moore's Chelsea Gray in the Advance line paint.

The color is light enough to brighten the space a bit, but dark enough to hide dirt perfectly I think. 

The treads look almost like solid planks now! I'm so happy with how they turned out. We just saved ourselves a couple thousand dollars by not replacing these oversized treads!

I have no ideas yet for what I'm going to use for a stair runner, but I'm really excited to pick that out next. I'll be trying something similar to this tutorial.

Also, on a whim I pulled out one of my old gold leaf pens and painted one of the round screw covers. The pen was pretty dry so the color's not very saturated, but I kind of like the look. What do you think of the gold just on the screw covers?

Before I buy the runner I have lots of touch ups to do and I think I'll paint the walls before installing the runner as well. But at least I'm happy with the direction we are headed in. It was well worth the labor, paint and about $12 in Bondo!