Pieces...

The stairway is still in pieces.

Here are a couple of before pictures...

By 'before' I mean after Tom ripped up the carpet

and 'before' he ripped out everything else.

That's what was under the carpet.

Beautiful hard wood and old rubber treads.

Here are the 'after' pictures...

Tom has sanded all of the steps.

Now he's working on the kickboards and banister.

He's waiting for me to finish stripping the paint off

with the heat gun.  (I really hate that thing)

Vacuming up the sawdust and paint scraps.

After two days of using the heat gun I am ready to hang - it - up - for - good and never see it again for as long as I live.  I don't know how many times I've burned my thumb on that thing.

Tom popped the end off of the endpost and it was hollow.  I shined a flashlight down it and sure enough, there was stuff down there.  I can see an old pair of pliers, some yellow paper (looks manila-ish), a pen and a bunch of other little bits of paper.  There's probably more that I can't see.  Tom tried to stick the vacume end down to get it out, but the vacume end was too big.  We'll get a tool to reach in tomorrow.  I'm hoping for something with a date on it so we can see when it was last worked on.  It's probably just a bunch of old garbage.

Winston's excited.  To him it's Treasure!