Pet Hair On The Stair

One of the best things I've ever built is the staircase in our house. It's super strong and the stairs are basically perfect in their rise/run. I'm so proud of them that I'm going to write a whole post about them eventually. In this post I'm going to focus on their one downfall, pet hair.
When I built the stairs I used standard dimensional lumber and ended up with a small gap at the back of each stair. It's only about 1/4 inch, maybe closer to 1/2 at the widest spots. It doesn't affect any quality of the stairs and when I built them I figured that once they were covered with carpet or something it wouldn't matter. Except they haven't been carpeted yet and it sort of matters because all of the stuff that comes off of your feet onto the stairs ends up falling through the cracks. If I swept more then there would be less to fall in the cracks, but I don't. The problem is that the cracks lead to the closet that is under the stairs. This is one of only two closets in the entire house so it's pretty important, everything that goes anywhere has to go here. Anything that has to go anywhere is then subjected to a constant rain of pet hair. It's remarkably unpleasant to get things out of the closet.
I did devise a temporary solution of putting duct tape on the bottom of the cracks to catch all of the hair and not let it fall on things in the closet. This worked quite well and became more of a long term solution. I figured I could just keep this system going by replacing any piece of tape that fell off through time but my wife had other ideas. This is mostly because I was very very slow in replacing the pieces of tape that fell off making it more like not a solution at all most of the time. Today I took the years of subtle (and increasingly not so subtle) hints that I had to so something proper to stop up the cracks and stop the constant rain of pet hair into the closet. $6.00 in wood and two hours of work and I had it all done. I could have probably done it in half the time but I like to be slow an inefficient when I can. By the time I was done I had dealt with so much hair and dust from pulling the remaining duct tape off the cracks that I was in the middle of a fairly substantial allergic attack. A quick shower and some benedryl seem to have taken care of that.
I was going to take a picture of one of the pieces of duct tape that I pulled out of the closet. It's pretty amazing how much hair you can get stuck to a piece of tape if it's in the right spot. My intuition is telling me that my wife would be less than thrilled with me sharing such a fascinating photo on the internet. She's not all that cool with a picture that says "look how disgusting our house is" even if I make it perfectly clear that it's not the whole house that's that hairy, just that one thing. You'll have to use your imagination.
This isn't much of a pet related post now that I read it, but it's what is going on in the life of this stay at home dad.