Creating a landing with (more) peel and stick tile |

Those of you who have been around this blog for a while may remember the incredibly crazy amount of time we spent re-doing our back stairway that leads to the back door and to the basement. In case you’re new around here, you can see the final reveal here. The biggest impact (after painting, that is) was for sure the new peel-and-stick vinyl floor tiles we installed ourselves:

Just for fun, here’s what the stairs looked like before!

As much as I was in love with the stairway makeover, I was still bummed out every time I actually used the stairs to head down to the basement. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we bought a house with that 70s basement–you know, the one with wood paneling and yellow walls that looks like it could have been on That 70s show. Although I made some good progress on this space a while back, I hadn’t yet done anything to the floors, which have been cold green concrete ever since we had to pull up the carpet due to flooding. So after walking down the beautiful stairs I’d be met with this:

Not a very nice transition. Here you can see how the room was starting to feel less 70s after I painted the window and walls–but that green floor was still there!

(Sorry for the blurry pics–I’m still trying to figure out the best way to photograph our rather dark basement!)

I had a mostly full box of vinyl tiles left, so I decided to continue the tile and create a landing area at the bottom of the stairs to continue the look. It was definitely much easier and faster than doing the stairs since I actually got to lay a few full tiles. But of course, given the age of our house (almost 100 years!) nothing was even or plumb. Nothing. But I made do and kept at it. If you’ve never given these tiles a chance but want to, I’d definitely encourage you to do so–they really are easy to get the hang of! With some determination (and while DH distracted the kiddos so they wouldn’t come traipsing by while I had out my razor for cutting the tiles…) I got these beauties down!

An improvement, right? We also made one other update right around this time–can you spot the other difference?

That’s right–baseboards! I forgot to snap some pics before those went in, but as you can see it made a huge difference. I’ll be sure to post more on that soon. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a nice set of before and after set of pics, because that’s much more fun to focus on than everything that’s still not done! Here’s what it looked like going down the stairs before:

And now after, with the new peel and stick tiles and the baseboard!