Even though covid-time-warp has us (yes I am baking sourdough bread every week) we have been moving forward a little on the hallway.
When I was buying the wood for the stairs, the salesperson knew my dad from twenty years ago – he recognized the last name! Above right, I left a space for the new medallion. Dad would sometimes try to talk customers into putting medallions in – and when he did get to do one, he’d be super proud of the result. I’m sure his “beauuutiful, beauuutiful” song was sung while doing those floors.
For our little hallway, I looked online for pre-made medallions, but they were all too big and too fancy. So I did the sensible (?) thing: I decided to make one.
It’s a compass rose – North has a very slight emphasis. It will be set into the floor pointing to magnetic north.
“You can never have too many clamps.” Here I’m clamping the cut-out pieces while they glue to a base of baltic birch plywood.
This is before sanding and polyurethane. Baseboards not in yet…
I’d never thought about it before: Usually you put baseboards on top of the floor, to cover the expansion gap at the edges of the floor. Doing the same on stairs, though, is very difficult. It has to fit the contour of not just one, but all the steps simultaneously. If you’re just off by 1/16 inch on each step, that quickly adds up a to a 1/4″ gap.
I’ve been trying not to damage the carpet on the stairs for the whole time I’ve been working on the hallway. But we don’t want that blue carpet permanently – so why not just take it out?
Now we can strip the paint off the sides of the stairs without worrying about melting carpet. Just a quick picture that is the disarray at the top of the stairs:
Sorry no kitteh pix this time…