take a good look. . .

. . . because this is the very last time you will see the stairs like this:

View from the front door:

View from inside the office:

View from the living room:

Do you see how far apart the spindles on the banister are?  Code is about 4 inches and these are about a foot apart!  The girls can crawl in and out of them—heck, so can I!  It’s not safe and looks bad.  Sooooooo. . . we are having all the banisters redone and wood floor put in on the stairs!  I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like and was browsing online to find a picture to show the guy who is doing the work for us and lo and behold I found someone doing almost the exact same thing I want done.

Here is their before (see how similar it is to ours?):

And here is their after:

The thing that really excited me was that they moved their newel posts back to the second step instead of the first, which is EXACTLY what I wanted to do but it’s not that common so I was having a hard time finding examples of it.  Since our front door opens right into our stairway, moving those back will make the entryway feel less cramped.  We will also be doing the stained treads with the painted white risers as shown in their after picture, so our after should look pretty similar, except our newel posts won’t be as beefy as theirs.

Our guy just started on the demo today. . . stay tuned!