Pictures of our stair project

Here is our wall with the first hole in it (thanks dad).

Here's Jon working on getting the wall out. Notice that awkward lovely little bookcase niche thingy there to the left? We discovered (as we suspected) that it was likely an old coat closet. When we knocked out that section there was almost a foot of dead space between the back of the shelves and the upper part of the stair wall on the opposite side. (confused?) Anyway, we are glad to be rid of that. Having the wall space is much nicer  and that thing was just in such a weird place.

Here is the wall down to the studs and the bookcase niche thing knocked out. There was also a sloped ceiling over the stairs that got taken out since it's all going to be open.Notice the header through the studs to the left over where Jon is... that was unnecessarily low, so we raised that as well (which you can kind of see in a future picture. This is showing the low-ness)

Since this was a load bearing wall, we called in my dad's framing guy to come put in some "kickers" to redistribute the weight to the two walls on either side of where the load bearing wall was. This was so that we didn't have to have a beam and column.
Here's a picture with the wall taken down.

Next up was drywall. After we bought our house we (or maybe my dad...) began to notice that the people who were working on the house did a horrible drywall job. It appeared that they would make patches and then didn't even sand them and then used a brush instead of a roller to paint them. The result is weird little spots with brush lines on them. Not really a big deal, but something that we wanted to remedy eventually by texturing. Since we were already going to be doing some sheetrock and drywall and paint, we decided that now was as good of a time as any to texture the hall Notice the higher header in this picture to the left of the stairs/wall with the spots on it. Much better!

 And since we were now texturing the hall and thus painting, we may as well paint all of the trim and the ceiling white.
Here is a before picture of the hall (after we painted the doors white). You can see that the trim is all the same color as the walls. This was one of the things I hated about this house, so I was really excited for white trim.
Also notice the low header in the upper foreground.

We used the same color of paint that we used in the basement. It's a very gray color, but it looks yellow in our hallway which doesn't get any natural light. I like that it's lighter than the yellowy color the previous owners who did the remodel used. We also put in some can lights and added a switch by our bedroom door. Those cans are actually on 4 switches, which is kind of fun.And awesome.

Now I just need to get the railing figured out. Yes, we've been without a railing for over a month.Yes, it's a little stressful at times, but luckily both Alex and Kaitlyn are pretty good about it.