Just when it's starting to feel like we're making actual progress on the house, I decide to call in a professional to discuss our options for the horribleness that is our stairs. Remember this issue? I think I mentioned it when we first removed the carpet from the stairs, and I've been doing my best to avoid it since then.... which is difficult to do considering I go up and down these stairs multiple times a day:

Our stairs have pulled away from the wall... and the wall has moved out... resulting in about a 1.5" gap between the stairs and the wall. I'm pretty confident that this movement happened a long time ago and I'm not really worried about it now, but it has left us with the issue of trying to fix the stairs. Since we've been gathering estimates for some of the bigger projects (the floors) so that we have a good idea of how much we need to save up in order to do these projects, I decided that it was time to actually talk to someone about the stairs. He came out this morning... and the end result of the conversation was that he could not fix the stairs without someone else coming in first to level out the landing. He also wants to rip out everything from the landing down and rebuild it all. I was hoping he could just replace the bottom 6 stair treads. His price was very high, esp. since we'd have to have a general contractor come in first and level out the landing. Ugh. Nothing in our house is level (it's 100 years old!) so we're not expecting things to be perfect. Actually, we'd much more prefer to keep the original pieces/parts of the stairs and only have to replace the stair treads... Now I just need to find someone who is willing to work with us on this.

In other news, I'm thinking of getting a couple of schoolhouse light fixtures for the hallways - a semi-flush mount for upstairs and a pendant for the downstairs. The upstairs hall now has a much lower ceiling b/c of how they put the a/c in. I found these at rejuvenation, but they are kind of expensive:

Then, while at Lowes the other day, Mike spotted this:

And it's $60 less than the one I found online, plus I wouldn't need to pay shipping. But it doesn't come in a pendant style... decisions, decisions. Not that we're even close to working on the hallways, I just like to find other things to do besides removing wallpaper from the kitchen :-)