Priming and Painting the Stairs...

Moving back to our current spiral staircase renovation:


We left off with the stairs ready for an application of our heavy duty primer, Shelac Based Zinsser primer tinted a lovely shade of gray. The tint helps to provide a perfect base to our glossy black paint, or any darker paint.

Why Shellac? Mainly because it is uber durable and offers a great surface for the actual paint to grab onto. We really don't want to ever have to repaint the stairs again during our tenure of ownership at the condo, and they get a lot of high traffic abuse during the summer months. You can see in the pictures that a lot of the stairs had some rust stain issues, and even though we were using black paint, we didn't want anything to leak through the final coat. Also, it's made from beetles, like crawly little bugs, I find that pretty interesting...



When it came time for painting, we did the every other stair method for coverage,that way the we could still utilize the stairs, since the only bathroom in the place is on the second floor. Hoofing it up the stairs every other one with no railing is murder on your knees and for people with balance issues (me.).

A few hours later, after the primer was extra dry... we cracked open the black paint and started rolling away. That night we were under an extreme time crunch, so the black paint had to get down and then we needed to get outta there asap. Which worked out because the fumes from the paint and primer were almost overwhelming us. The night ended with us getting outta there without being able to take a moment to step back and check out the transformation taking place.