When we moved into our new house in October 2014, we triaged our redecoration. We repainted walls in colours that we preferred, especially those downstairs rooms that visitors might see, or rooms we’d be in much of the time. We decided not to bother too much with any of the carpets: they were pretty knackered, and when we had time and money we’d get rid of them. Besides, we were going to get a puppy.
Fast-forward a year, and Cleodhna was looking at replacing the stair carpet with rubber tiles, because they’re easy to clean and the dogs would be happy.
(This isn’t as silly an idea as it sounds. Habibi, our smallest dog, doesn’t like going up stairs where she can see gaps between the steps, and she has problems on wooden staircases. We wanted to be sure that she would be comfortable going up and down, and not insist on being carried up the stairs all the time.)
The website had a range of tiles in various colours, and the way it was displaying them… Why choose just the one colour?
Well, she ordered a bunch of tiles, and we offered them up in situ. And of course we clamped her Proper Camera to the bannister with a tripod/octopus hybrid that you can get in John Lewis, because we were going to do things properly:
And lo and behold, now we have TARDIS stairs:
Here’s a before and after shot. As is traditional with these sort of things, the before shot is lit badly to make it look even worse than it actually was.
Part of me wishes that they lit up and played sound when you trod on them, just to go into full-on music video territory. That’s almost certainly a bad idea, though. Not only would it be tricky, impractical and the novelty value would wear off, at least one of us would probably suffer a significant injury while trying to play the stairs like a musical instrument. Besides, there are 12 stairs, and (assuming each stair went up by a semitone) you’d need 13 to make a complete octave. The missing last note would drive me spare.
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