Stairs, and the negatives..

When we bought the house, the stairs were carpeted. At the top, there are two small windows, facing each other - one had blue glass, the other yellow.  It meant that there was this weird yellow/purple glow over everything:

Both windows have broken panes, which we will be replacing with clear glass. Anyway, we ripped up the carpet (to reveal rimu), filled the holes:

And spent a couple of days sanding them back, with the help of our trusty power-tool-thingy (is it called a sander? I have no idea about these things...):

Excuse the crazy glow - it's those windows.  They still need a couple of coats of oil, but they're looking way better already, especially with that black negative-detailing up the side:

Speaking of which, that is one of the things we accomplished this weekend (yay for three-day weekends and visitors from Auckland).

Every door and window has a recessed detail surrounding it, painted glossy black. They look great. The ladies at Resene think they are cray-cray and when I tried to get advice about painting them they all suggested I just paint them white, like the walls. But look how cool they are:

...and close up (I think I had sanding dust over my camera lens or something):

And here is an unnamed, bald relative applying his precision skillz to the detailing:

We also spent several hours removing masking tape from the windows - word of advice: pay for decent masking tape. That stuff you buy at Bunnings (5 rolls for $8) is a bitch to remove.

And finally, I cleaned - swept and vacuumed the floor - apparently I may be allowed to seal it tomorrow if our builder thinks it's up to scratch.

In other depressing news, it turns out that cork tiles are much more expensive than we anticipated (although I found out too late that Bunnings had cheap ones - I raced to the store to find some tradie buying the very last of all the Bunnings cork tiles in the country), so we can't afford to pay someone to lay them.  I had really hoped to avoid it, but looks like I may have to lay them myself. Uncool, very uncool.