That Time I Drove Myself to Lunacy or The Chevron Patterned Stairs Project

As you guys already know I'm a very artistic person. Aesthetic details are what make my world turn. So when I looked upon this drab old stair case day to day I knew I had to freshen it.

 Blah, right? The lighting is also an issue that we will be working on a little bit later. I knew that this project was going to be a time consuming undertaking so I waited until I had a stretch of days off from work.
The first step was to get the stairs cleaned up a bit. There were a bunch of scuff marks and cobwebs. We just never really focused attention on this area of our home since moving in last year. The vacuum and Mr.Clean Magic Eraser did the trick for getting rid of any ick.
Once the stairs were cleaned and prepped I began by painting the stairs with the base coats of Ultra White Semi-gloss paint. We didn't go fully glossy because we didn't want them to be super glaring. This required about two coats of paint due to the thickness of the beige color underneath.
Once that was finished John and I measured out a chevron stencil and used an exacto knife to cut this out of cardboard. IMPORTANT: make extra sure that you know the proper dimensions of all of the stairs. Our very top and bottom steps had slightly different dimensions due to how the steps were constructed. I placed the stencil starting from the left side of the stairs so that the chevron patterns would match up on each step. There were also some odd cutouts on the top right stair. 

 

The taping took a few days on its own. Unfortunately, I got sick with an awful cold and wasn't able to paint until a week later. I was really beat after taping up all those chevrons. Finally, after I began to feel better I painted the black kettle color over the top of the paint. Just so you guys know, painters tape sucks. It bled like crazy.

So after I pulled the tape and saw this I used some of my artist paintbrushes with both colors and spent a couple hours doing touch ups. Here is the finished product.

The walls and the stair guard are going to be painted in the coming weeks. Cold weather means indoor home improvement projects for us.