When Does a Home Feel Like It Has Accepted You As Its New Owner?

Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 25)

Miranda Suman (Steinhauser)

Published in

Between 6 and 7

5 min readJul 19, 2017

Dismantling Stairs

The first item on our list of to-dos was taking apart our grand staircase this week. This would allow us to replace some of our broken spindles as well as being able to sand and refinish the stairs, handrail, and spindles separately. Cal began by removing our gross yellow carpeting from the staircase and the room immediately felt cleaner. Our stair repair specialist then arrived and took apart the railing and spindles and numbered each one so that we’d know the correct order when putting it all back together.

Floors, Floors, Everywhere!

Next, we essentially handed the keys to our flooring specialists to tackle the 3500-ish square feet of original and repaired/replaced red oak flooring of our home. New floors had already been weaved into several of our home’s rooms where water damage destroyed them previously. Approximately 1/3 of the house was gutted after burst pipes poured water through the house for several weeks 4 years ago, so about 1000 square feet or so needed to be installed and blended with our original floors.

Moving heavy radiators and organizing doors

Working from the 3rd floor down, Cal, Christian, Brandon, and I worked to clean up the house, removing all debris, junk, doors, and radiators from the floors to give ample room for sanding. As sanding of the 3rd floor began, our flooring contractors were astonished at the condition of our nearly 100 year old floors. Despite the more recent water damage, we have virtually no stains, spotting, or damage anywhere else in the home, so sanding has been a breeze! The machinery used to sand is quite, old, loud, and powerful, but it really gets the job done!

After about a week of sanding we are finally able to stand in the home and see nothing but white painted walls, floors all the same color, and empty clean rooms! I think it’s this moment where I finally felt like the home had become a blank slate. Standing in these fresh clean rooms with little to no remnants of damage, junk, critters, or owners past really felt like the home had shed it’s previous skin and had shown off it’s new future look. We still have alot of pink and yellow paint to get rid of, but overall the home really feels like it has turned a new leaf!

Here’s where some of our major rooms stand:

Master Bedroom Day 1 (left) Today (Right)

Refinishing Spindles

A little project Brandon and I are tackling now while sanding and staining of floors is underway is to sand and repaint our spindles. We’ve developed a technique of heat guns and some paint removing solution to get the job done and now have about 40 more spindles to do out of about 60! Wish us luck in the weeks ahead to get these ready for prime and paint time!