Now it’s open…

… and now it’s shut.  Check it out!  Our very own locking* trap door storage, ingeniously located under the stairs.  How many houses come with a trap door storage area?  How cool is that?

That is eight cubic feet of storage space that was completely unused and wasted, and now we can hoard pirate treasure in there if we want to.  When you live in a small house, storage space is really valuable.

That bottom riser needs to be replaced at some point.  I used some T-111 cedar paneling that I had, which I think looks great, but the bottom one has kind of a defect on the right hand side that wouldn’t take any color.  I’ll use it for now, but only because the alternative is to buy a whole 4′ x 8′ sheet just so I can cut a 5″ x 28″ strip out of it.  Nah, I’ll wait until I do the rest of the stairs.  It’ll work for now.

I’m telling you, whoever stapled the carpet down to the original treads was a madman.  Staple holes galore.  I could have put wood putty in the holes but then they’d stick out white instead of black.  I think this way, the treads look finished but distressed, and not artificially distressed like what you pay extra for at pottery barn.  No, this is the real thing.  This wood was not only distressed, but beaten, mugged and left for dead.

So, the house has got a lot of different colors and textures going on and I think overall it’s working great.  We don’t like everything to be matchy-matchy, we like to have a little variety of styles going on.  Again, it’s a small house, and if we did everything in one color set and one style, it would dominate the entire house.  A little variation is a good thing.

* so yeah, the trap door doesn’t actually lock just yet.  Due to a math error by the designer (me), the key is about 1 centimeter too short to engage the lock.  The beam ended up being a little thicker than I intended it to.  Well, it’s not like that lock would stop anybody, and it’ll take more than a stiff wind to open the trapdoor anyway.  It’s pretty heavy and manages to stay in place by itself.

So with this project completed and the weather outside getting nicer, I think I’m going to spend the next few weeks doing some landscaping and outdoor cleanup and just generally finding other things to spend money on.  I’m anxious to continue remodeling up the stairs (you can see those atrocious wooden spindles in the above pics; they must die) but the next phase is going to be pretty big.  It’ll probably turn the house into a war zone for six weeks.  The more prep work I do before demolition, the smoother it will all go.  So I’ll take my time before I get started with it.