It will be a year in August that I bought my house and I feel like I have not done anything to it! All my grand plans went out the window when winter came along and I began my hibernation. I am really going to have to move some place warmer if I want to accomplish things in the winter! But I digress. I finally had a free weekend so I decided to start my fight against the layers of paint covering my 100+ year old wood stairs. When I moved in they had black rubber treads glued on! Yuck!

After searching around for a non-chemical stripper and finding pretty much nothing I decided to start scrapping and see how it went. There are low VOC strippers out there but over the past few years i have developed a lovely (not so) little case of asthma so I didn’t really want to risk it plus they got horrible reviews anyway! Above is how the stairs looked after ripping off the offensive elementary school style rubber treads. Below is during the scrapping process. It’s coming along nicely but I am starting to regret doing this in summer in an un-air conditioned house… sweat anyone!?