Stairs & Roof

What a curious couple of weekends this has been. Since we bought our house it has been in pretty desperate need of some TLC. The roof and stairs have been particular eyesores I've had to look at every day since moving in. The roof is Concrete tile, an extremely common roofing material in this region, and must be a major nightmare for Australian firefighers. I've got to figure there is at least a tonne or two of concrete covering the average house. Durable stuff, but with time it develops some pretty catastrophic faults if it's not maintained. 1. Tiles crack, break, and slip out of position. This lets water in. 2. Ridge caps (points) need to be cemented down in place, these can work loose, and in severe winds from an unfortunate direction, lifted out of place. This lets water in. Combine these faults with the potential for torrential drenchings through the summer, then a roof containing around 2-dozen cracked tiles, and loose points left me really uneasy last summer.

But finally it's no longer an issue. We've contracted in a pretty good roofing company who've replaced all of those cracked tiles, re-bedded all of the points, cleaned it all up, and given it a beautiful couple of coats of paint. Scratch one off the list.

Now for the stairs. This was one I was determined to tackle myself. It looked like one of the previous 2 owners had made an attempt at re-coating the oak staircase in the house, but they did a pretty half-assed job of it. The stain / coating had gone seriously yellow, and the edges and corners of the steps appeared faded or chipped. Obviously they had at least attempted to sand back the previous coating before applying new Polyurethane, but hadn't sanded back into the corners and sides. I was determined to correct this issue. At first I was wondering what stain to use, but after a couple trips to Bunnings to compare samples it looked like a nice Oil-based Polyurethane on the raw timber would produce the look we wanted. I picked up a $35 orbital sander which I didn't expect to get through much more than this set of stairs but it has been holding up magnificently, barely heating up at all with several hours of continuous sanding. I had been working the sides and corners using paper and a small wooden toy triangle block (handy having a baby:) but wasn't fully happy with the result. It was a lot cleaner than the previous attempt had gone over, but not quite.

A chance conversation with the painter who was working on the roof as he was cleaning up proved to be an ace. Use a file. I had to make a trip to Bunnings before I started staining to upgrade the amount of Poly for the stairs, so I started looking around at files before settling on a small, half-curve file for $10. It worked out better than I could have imagined at cleaning out the corners, sides, and even running down the back edge to scrape away stuff. In the end I still managed to miss one corner. (bugger) I just put down the second coat this morning and will do the third coat this evening but already the stairs look 10x better than they did. Still, it's turning into a 3-weekend job when I had thought originally it would only take 1 weekend. I had guessed that the initial sanding would take about 3 hours. It took over 9, even with a powered sander. In sanding the stairs I originally didn't plan to do any risers until I got a close look at the risers on the 2nd half of the staircase. Ah well, it did mean we could spend extra time planning and preparing. Next weekend will be the risers.

And that will be the first 2 off the list. Only 98 remaining. :)