The time has come.

It's way past time for me to tackle this sorry eyesore.

It's the stairs from the main floor to the second floor. And they're a hot mess left over from the reno.

I've been holding off on them as I was thinking of wallpapering or adding wainscot to the wall going up the stairs, but I've been unable to make up my mind exactly what to do. So I've lived with the wall partly primed and the woodwork all chipped up for the last year. And I can't stand it any more.

This weekend's job is to prime the walls, do a whole lotta caulking to fill in all the holes on the underside of the bannister that you can now see from the dining room table

 and paint the woodwork. I'm hoping that we might also walk over to our neighbourhood carpet store and pick out something for the stairs. We're in desperate need of it as the stairs are really slippery for poor Tessa and I'm worried that she's going to fall and hurt herself.

I was originally thinking of a runner, but the stair treads are in pretty poor condition, and there are a lot of gaps around the edges and at the top.

We had to rebuild the floor at the top of the stairs when we we redid the bathroom and laundry room as the beams were so bowed down in the middle. The blue streak on the top riser shows just how much the second floor had sunk due to some previous idiotic owner who removed the supporting wall in the kitchen and didn't make any modifications to help bear the load.

I think that we'll go wall-to-wall on the stairs with something really neutral that blends with the colour of the hardwood at the bottom. Because the stairs now take a 90° turn at the bottom, you can't really see them unless you're actually walking up them.

So while I prefer the look of a runner, I can't justify the expense and effort of totally redoing the stairs so that we can have one. We'll leave the landing and the bottom two steps uncarpeted, and stop at the top step.

It's going to be a painful weekend, but I know that I'll breathe a sigh of relief at the end and wonder why in the heck I waited so long to tackle it!