Halfway up the stairs

Sooooooo, now I am 23 years into my 3 year project and I have just completed the lower section of my staircase. Here is what it looked like 23 years ago.

Eight months later it looked like this.

From 2008 until present it looked like this at the bottom. I wrote a post back in 2008 about the volute. There were seven missing balusters.

I finally found some that were similar in shape and long enough to use in 2023. They were painted white and were several different types of wood. The original ones are cherry. I finally got off my duff this month and stripped the paint from the replacement balusters and "painted" them with Miniwax Polyshades American Chestnut. I had to do some repairs on the hand rail using resin wood filler. Here are before and after photos.

With the balusters in place and the hand rail set I had to apply the Polyshades to all the balusters to make them look alike. I then could apply Miniwax Polyshades Classic Black to the hand rail. Once done I waxed everything with furniture wax applied with fine steel wool. The whole process took several weeks due to drying time between coats of polyurathane. It looks like this now. Yay me!