I have been anxiously awaiting the day I would say buh-bye to the last of the basement’s heinous blue carpeting complete with forty years of wear, tear and stains.  Ewww, the stains.  So, in a budget conscious and little friendly manner, we (ie. Honey) stripped out the nastiness and painted the stairs and hand rail.  He used three coats of oil based paint in Benjamin Moore high gloss Fieldstone.  He then topped with two coats of clear something-or-other (can’t recall what it’s called just now… let me know if you  need to know.)  He also updated the brass hardware holding up the handrail with oil rubbed bronze spray paint.  That stuff is the cats meow.  Here’s where we started…

Over the years, we have amassed thousands of pictures and hundreds of frames in various shapes, sizes and finishes.  The first step to creating a cohesive look for a stair way gallery was to take all the mismatched frames outside and spray paint them black.  Most started that way, but had a more than a few gold leaf, white or brown wood. 

Once painted, I laid them all out and cut paper in the sizes of the frames.  I used the coupon section of the Sunday paper so as not to leave newsprint marks on the wall.  (And for double the productivity, I clipped a few to save on the groc bill).  As you cut (the frame templates…not the coups), it helps if you number the back of each frame and the front of each paper.  You know, so that once you get them on the wall you can tell which piece of paper went with which frame.  Unless you like an extensive game of mix ‘n match…  

After taping all my pages up with painters tape, I left Honey to work his magic.  It was pretty darn ah-mazing to leave for an hour and come back to THIS:

So to marvel at just how far we’ve come… here is our before and after!

To finish it all out, we swapped this lovely relic from the past…

…for a carriage house gate style sconce from Pottery Barn (excuse the strange mood lighting).

And, should you want to peruse the unabridged edition of ALL the titillating details for this entire basement project, look here for the vision, here for a eight month update, here for the bar reveal, here for the finally finished banquette, here for the buffet and here for the den. Last but not least will be the bathroom!!

xoxo