When Home Improvement Goes Awry

Have you ever experienced the frustration of home improvement projects that have gone awry? Welcome to my world. Once upon a time I had a leaky bathtub faucet. I thought I could fix it myself. It's a simple matter of replacing a washer, right? I went in fully prepared. I took a community education plumbing class first. I spend 3 hours learning about faucets and connections. I took a 2 handled faucet apart and put it together again. I took a ball headed faucet apart and put it together again. I even soldered a copper pipe together with a propane torch. I took my new plumbing skills home and set to work. I already had the plumbing wrench. I stood in the tub, removed the faucet cover, and cranked on that baby to loosen it. To increase my leverage, I leaned my formidable backside against the tiled wall. It caved. No, not the faucet, the tile wall. Suddenly the leaky faucet was an insignificant problem. My main problem was a rear end sized hole in the bathroom wall. True, the wall had problems before I leaned against it and in the long run, it was better to get that fixed right away. That brings me to today. Several months ago I had some floors replaced with laminate. I like the laminate. The set of 8 stairs between the laminated sections remained undone. Putting laminate on stairs is difficult, expensive, and ends up looking different because quarter round is needed around every single step. I found out that the tread on the steps was a nice oak wood. My plan was to stain and varnish those steps to match the laminate - a golden oak color. Sounds simple? I removed all the nails and carpet tacks. I sanded those steps to a polish. I counter sunk the nails holding the stairs in place. On Friday, I filled in the nail holes and other slight imperfections with plastic wood filler. Plastic wood filler comes in colors. I chose golden oak to match the stain. I put that plastic wood filler on ever so carefully. Yesterday I stained that stairs. I thought it seemed a little dark and as I left the house, I hoped the stain would lighten up. If not, that would be okay too because the kick board around the stairs is darker. When I got home last night I was appalled at my stairs. The stain color was okay and it went on smoothly but every molecule of plastic wood filler showed in brilliant contrast to the stain. Every nail hole I covered and every imperfection I tried to conceal stood out like stars in a black sky. My stairs looked terrible! Why did I use so much plastic wood filler? Why was I so generous with the stuff? Who cares if there is a slight depression in the wood? Those slight depressions wouldn't even be visible to the eye or the bare toe except now they were because I had filled them with the dreaded plastic wood filler!!! This morning I tried scraping the evil plastic wood filler off with my fingernail, scraper, a screw driver and my sander. I worked on the bottom tread for about an hour. Then I restained it to see how it turned out. Although the stair looks better, the remnants of the plastic wood filler remain plainly visible. I'm off to the home disimprovement store to buy some paint to cover those stairs. It's only stairs, right? How important are they? I think I'll buy a nice dark walnut brown and paint over the wood and the plastic wood filler and the stairs will look good as new.