Like the utility room, we enthusiastically destroyed parts of the stairs and then abandoned them for over a year and have just got round to finishing them off.

We really wanted to remove a weird mini step at the bottom of the stairs which was created when previous owners seem to have poured concrete all over the ground floor hallway to raise the level. Weirdly thanks to bizarre planning laws that seem to protect the awful 1970’s changes to the house, we can’t just redo the bottom step and we’d have to rip out the whole staircase to do it properly.

We were going to sand the stairs and landings before the runner went up but the wood underneath wasn’t great and, as we think we might totally revamp the staircase at some point we decided to just paint them for now and fully cover the landings and keep the weird inch high step.

We also cheated and got a painter in to get rid of the shiny magnolia as trying to balance a ladder on the stairs while reaching up and painting didn’t sound too appealing while pregnant. He also replastered over the join between what used to be two separate buildings and removed three mis-matched and warped hand rails.

We’ve not finished yet as we’re missing handrails and some finishes at the top of the stairs but even changing paint colour subtly made a big difference.