Last night, I was able to pull off the bottom and top stair risers and sand/stain them, drawing the Toxic Refinishing portion of the project to a close. They look pretty good; I suppose they could look better, but I need to get them re-installed and finished pretty quick. Once the treads are down, I’ll probably put about 2 more coats of poly on them, but they look pretty good so far. All the backs are covered with 2 coats of white paint so they’ll match the rest of the basement (and not look so frickin’ bad) and at least surface-sanded. The only thing left is the very top kickplate (actually the cross-joist support) which needs to be heat-gunned and sanded/painted.

I also put in the closet pole; the brick wall side went in fine but the closet wall side is a victim of poor planning- I didn’t put any vertical supports in so there’s nothing to nail or tie that support into directly under the drywall. I think what I can do though is put a set of 3″ drywall screws through to the box I made which straddles the 4-pot electrical box on the other side of the wall. If there’s too much vertical stress, I’ll add a 4″ support running from the bottom of the bracket down to the top of the kickplate. Above the closet pole I installed the wire shelf, and this also fell into the ‘should have planned better’ category. There are two central studs in the middle of the wall, but nothing on the ends off the wall, so there’s about a 1′ length that is unsupported- unacceptable. I’m going to buy a third long angle support and try the 3″ screw trick at an angle to try to hit the edge of the stud frame. Other than those issues, it looks great; I’m really happy with the results. Now that the shelves are up I can get to working on the wiring issues.

Next up is getting the stairwell finished- sanding, priming and painting the rest of the uncovered drywall and then painting the whole enclosure. Then I’ll vacuum up the rest of the dust and generally clean up the mess; there’s a lot of covering painting to do, but that can wait for now. I have to wait for my next paycheck to pick up a 4’x4′ sheet of sanded finish plywood-that will be about $25 or so-for the front shelf. I measured out a 4’x’4 square on the floor and laid the two 10″ planks to see if I could get one sheet of wood out of it- it looks to be no problem, although I don’t like the idea of cutting across the grain of the plywood. We’ll see how it goes. I’d like to concentrate on the wiring next, and get the phone and cable hooked up; after that we tackle the admittedly harder job of wiring the RJ-45. I’d also like to do some of the small stuff around the house, like actually cut and install the finish molding in the upstairs hall and clean up the old radiator-area in the front bedroom.