ah, the stair saga

so the stair guy came. apparently he used to live on our street, in our house model even. i thought this would be a good sign. what i didn't expect was that he likely lived here WITH HIS PARENTS. i swear the dude is like 23, maybe. he was, however, very professional and knowledgeable and spouted lots of information about codes and such.

short story, to gut and redo all the stairs would be VERY expensive, VERY time consuming, and pretty much more than he could handle. but likely more than we can handle, cost-wise, right now. the upside of this is that he had lots of ideas of work arounds that would be within code. he's supposed to get back to us "soon" with the estimate.

alex and i talked about it for a loooong time last night. his fears are that it will still be too expensive (possibly, but i doubt it, of our available options...); that it will "look weird" (yes, i agree it's ideal to redo the stairs but let's face it, it's not really an option); and his fear of contractors (all the hororr stories of them taking your money and running (that's fair).

so after talking i got him to agree not to make any decisions (yes, he still thinks he can somehow rebuild them all himself) until we got the estimate. the work we're asking for still has us doing a fair amount of it and still doing all the flooring ourselves (much to my dismay he would not ask about the guy doing the floor).

the guy called today to ask 2 more questions. i'm hoping that means that we'll have some numbers soon.

i think doing the "we have THIS MANY" weeks left and this is how long i THINK it will take to do all the other rooms (high estimate) and how much time that didn't really leave for the stairs helped.

let's all still keep our fingers crossed....