Car jacks are so useful

Last weekend, I wanted to pry up one of the stairs to see if I could be lazy about one of my house projects. There's terrible paint on the stairs, and on the risers, there is still this ugly brown adhesive that is ugly and disgusting and I hate it. I thought that maybe instead of stripping off all the paint and the adhesive, I would just flip the stairs over. What an easy way to solve the problem!

So I started hammering at the stairs, attempting to pop one up. I used a scrap of wood to protect the step, and hammered up at the lip of the step to see if I could dislodge it. I couldn't. I spent quite a bit of time attempting this, but it's hard to get a lot of upward momentum with the three inches that were available between the block of wood and the next stair down. This is when I remembered how useful the car jack came in when we were uprooting a bush out front a couple of summers ago.

I sped out to the Honda and brought the car jack inside. It lifted the step up in a jiffy! Hurrah! Unfortunately, because of the way the stairs were built, my plan of flipping them over won't work. This means I don't get to dismantle the stairs, which is a bummer. I do so like tearing things down. It also means I have to go back to Plan A, which involves stripping all the paint off the stairs. Luckily, we have a guest bed, so when it takes me all weekend, we'll still have a place to sleep.

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