Staircase reassembly & Mom's bday

2006
Sunday, February 12

Today I got a lot accomplished, as well as had our first family birthday/dinner party in our house. The first half of the day was spent re-assembling the stairway, then later on we celebrated my Mom's b-day.

All this past week I've been bit by bit putting and sanding the staircase and it's trim-work.





Mostly I've been working on the railing, spindles and trim, but yesterday and today I finally got to sand the actual stairs. I've been dying to do it for the longest time. My goal was to finish sanding them, the spindles and reassemble the railing. On the 6th I disassembled the railing in order to sand the spindle base flush.

I finally found a putty that I'm happy with. I've tried many ranging from plastic to water putty and finally Elmer's wood filler. I like the fact that I could by it pre-stained to match natural wood..... and it's actually the right color. I've tried others similar and they're always too yellow or to orange, but this one is the closest I've used so far. I liked using it so much that I'm regretting not finding it sooner, but oh well.

One step had a nice dent in it. Tim and I noticed it when were were adding more protection to the stairs, after the installation. The Elmer's putty worked nicely to fill in the dent. The dent is hardly noticeable anymore after the putty dried, was sanded and I penciled in some grain lines, by colored pencils.



After I finished with the steps, my goal was to reassemble the railing before my family started arriving for my Mom's birthday dinner at 6:30p. It was about 2pm when I started reassembling all the bamboo spindles and nailed it back together.














Today was the first official time we've had a birthday dinner at the house. I finished puttying it around 3 or so, with just enough time to make my famous chocolate pie and blitz the house with Tim, before everyone arrived. We invited my parents, my grandma and my brother and his family over for my Mom's birthday. Yesterday I bought a new table linen for my Aunties Art Deco table, which didn't fit our other one, with the leaf in it. It's not a huge table, but fits 6 comfortably, has many memories and it was nice to have my family gathered around it again.



Tim bought some flowers to make it look a bit more homey in the kitchen. During dinner we had the fireplace lit, while eating an awesomely yummy dinner, that Tim had prepared for all of us. After dinner we casually caught up around the kitchen counter. My Dad said, at one point, that it was a very comfortable spot, which is exactly what Tim wanted to accomplish when designed the kitchen... that's what we wanted, a comfortable area where people wanted to converse and catch up.... and I guess we designed it well, cause that's exactly what happened :)

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