Two Months Down.....and I'm still not done!

Okay, time to reveal what I have done on my banister so far!  Its kinda sad to think that I have been working on this baby for two whole months and I don't even have the whole thing done yet.  But, I am still VERY proud of myself.  I have done EVERY LITTLE THING all by MYSELF!

Okay, so this is how the banister started out.  Just a bright orange color....not my taste :)

I sanded the WHOLE thing down.  Actually, not the whole thing, just the left side of it.  It took me over 8 hours and I was getting so impatient that I decided to start staining, rather than sand down the other little side.  I know, that was kinda dumb of me but I was ready to see some progress!

I chose a dark walnut stain.  I didn't realize it would take me two months to get the stain dark enough!  The original color was so bright that it took me about eight coats to get it dark enough to cover up the orange. I had to wait two days between each coat because it was still sticky and wouldn't go on smooth if I didn't wait until it was completely dry.

After the first coat

After the second coat

After the third coat

One really discouraging thing that happened was once I got it as dark as I wanted, the instructions I was following told me to use a fine sandpaper at about 220 to go over the whole banister to get the air bubbles out.  Well 220 was definitly NOT fine enough and it took off my stain and you could see orange coming through again.  I was so discouraged! I had to stain it a few more times after that and then sand it down with a 600 grain paper. Then I covered it in a satin polyurathane finish and sanded that down.

Then I didn't take any pictures after the next few coats.  This was probably after 8 coats

I was now ready to tape off the stairs and the wall and prime and paint the spindles and the base.

And here is the finished product!!  Well sorta, I still have to do the other side and up the stairs. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  How bout you?

Another note, notice in the pictures above where I was just starting out you can see that my entryway was still white walls with orange baseboards.  We have since painted the whole first floor in Antique White by Behr and ripped out all the baseboards and trim and replaced them with thick white baseboards.  Click on the photos to see them larger!  Do you like it?  Kinda funny that you can see where I stopped painting next to the banister.  I'm excited to get started on the upstairs once I finish this banister.  I really have to learn to finish one project before I move onto the next :)