Your questions answered!

Hi everyone. I decided to create a short recap post to answer the questions posed in the comments section of my last entry because this was really too long to post as a comment.

When we bought the house, it had a partially finished basement, with a living space, a closet, and a terrifying bathroom with scary, scary shower. The basement was finished sometime between 1950 and 1970 (hard to tell) in dreaded paneling and ugly vinyl tile. The POs carpeted over the tile and added a new furnace, water heater, and A/C. So, it was finished, but not nicely. When we moved in, we painted the ugly paneling, repainted the bathroom, and replaced the vanity, but we had no further plans to redo the basement, as it was functional, until it flooded, once right after we moved in (not badly) and then more so last spring. See posts here and here for more backstory. Last summer, we had a waterproofing company install an internal sump system with drainboard against the walls, which required most of the walls be ripped out. We discovered a lot of rot and water damage in the process, necessitating a much larger tear out than we had planned. We've stripped everything to a shell and are now working (slowly) to fix a lot of issues and create a great new living space, with a functional laundry room (previously the dryer and washer were across the room from each other), more storage, and an awesome new bathroom. We hope to finish this project sometime this spring.
The POs widened the staircase to the basement and relocated it when they remodeled the kitchen. The cut a few floor joists in the process and did some dubious stabilization, causing that whole thing where we jacked the kitchen floor up and re-supported it. The stairs are now very stable and don't bounce when you walk up and down, which is nice. The staircase is open to the room below and I think that we can make it into a nice feature for that room. The POs carpeted the stairs with $0.99/yd awful berber carpet to sell the house, but I pulled some of it back and found gorgeous hardwood treads. So, the plan is to install a period appropriate newel and rail terminating in a rosette on the support beam we installed. I should make a decision on what we're going to order this weekend, I'll post about that soon.