spur of the moment

Yesterday, I spent the better part of the day unit planning for the upcoming school year. After many hours of sitting at my desk, I felt a little stir crazy and up for a quick project. So I decided to paint our stairs. I've had this thought in my mind for a long time.  Our stairs are painted dark chocolate brown.

As you can see in this picture, the color is nothing exciting and the staircase doesn't particularly stand out. So, I decided to paint the  risers bright white, to match the molding on the wall side of the stairs. 

The first thing I did was tape off the treads and landings, since I wanted to leave those brown. I'm a messy painter, so for me, this is definitely a necessary step. I used my dependable Frog Tape and the prep work took me about 20 minutes.

Then I started at the top and I primed all the steps, so that I could more easily cover all that brown with white paint. I then did 3 coats of white paint on each riser. Each coat only took about 15 minutes, making this a very quick painting project.  An added bonus of this project was that I had all materials on hand so this cost me 2 hours and $0.

Here are some pictures of the finished product. I love how much brighter the stairs are. Since this is a windowless room, it tends to stay dark, especially in the ever-present foggy weather. The white makes everything seem a bit lighter.

You can see in this picture that I made several other changes to the space. I switched the direction of the rug, which made us like the new round table a lot more. We also added our blue bench, so the area feels more "finished" than it did previously. 

A before and after shot:

 (I apologize for the poor photo quality of this post... Sadly, I still don't have my real camera and have had to rely on phone pictures in the interim.)