for the love of a staircase

so i thought i would share a corner of my home with you.

now it's not particularly pretty (at least not yet...i'm working on it!) but i really love the stairs in my house. this is a section of my home that is greatly taken for granted. i go up and down the stairs about a hundred times a day (or so it seems) without much thought, unless i'm vacuuming them and then the thought is "ugh, what a chore!"

but every now and again, i start to walk down them and suddenly i need to just sit and look at them. i realize that they're very pretty stairs. the wall paper around them is not ugly but needs to be painted over and the ceiling has a large crack (as you can see) but if you could look closely, you'd see that the ceiling is not painted but plastered in sweeping spirals with bits of glitter catching the light, done by my grandfather (who was a plasterer and a mason) more than 30 years ago.

the stairs also sport a small, but very pretty, stained glass window that my dog loves to sit by, with her butt and back legs on one step and her front paws on the next step down, and watch the world go by.

at the top of the stairs sits an antique milk can (belonging to my mother, but i really don't think i'll be giving it back to her any time soon :^) with a big, drapey plant that has begun to grow between the spindles and down into the downstairs hall below.

i remember sitting cross-legged on the bottom landing and throwing a ball up the stairs so that it would bounce back down to me over and over (of course back then i was only 3 apples tall and could easily fit on that bottom landing with room to spare...uh...not anymore!)

i guess i'm feeling particularly nostalgic about my staircase today. around it is the next area to be painted. i have yet to choose a color and have had a million thoughts flit through my brain(like the one where i paint the walls blue, mural rolling fields and paint the floor to look like either a dirt path or a flagstone path; or the one where i paint a stained glass window into a stone wall at one end - but that would make it too dark, the hall is very small!) i just haven't decided where to go with this hallway yet.

i often wander through my house and think back to what the rooms "used" to look like. i have a bunch of old pictures at home that i need to scan and believe me, you will all have a good laugh at the old wallpaper, the paneling, the clothing styles of my family! oh but it's funny!

well, until next time!