So, along with my disgust of carpeting comes my lovely dog. We have three dogs, actually. One dog, however, is a nervous pee pot. He will get up in the morning, run down the stairs and have a small accident on each. and. every. step. I don't know about you, but after he did it the first time I realized that it is near impossible to clean carpeted stairs. They are almost impossible to vacuum, let alone "clean" stains off of. Since we finished our eat in area in the family room, I am on a remodel kick. I want to rip out all of our carpet and put in the hardwood that we selected for the eat in area. Since that isn't currently in the budget, I have to settle. We will eventually replace all 2400 square feet of carpet, until then I decided to work on this....
Dark, dingy, ugly, stained, and you would not believe the dust!! It was
so disgusting, I wish I would have snapped more photos. Anyway, I told
my dear, dear husband that we should rip up the carpet. He went straight
to work, it took no bribing! I think maybe he hates carpet more than I
do! We had a pretty good idea that our stairs were hardwood underneath
because the bottom four steps had the edges exposed and stained. We took
a leap of faith and started tearing it up. As we started working I
started wondering why people carpet stairs, I soon gave up.
We started by ripping up the carpet, we used a box cutter to cut it out
in manageable sections. Then, we pulled up the padding. Then, I cursed
the person who thought it a good idea to put carpet on the stairs. The
amount of staples and tack strips on our stairway were absolutely
astonishing. The tack strips weren't that bad to pull up, but the
staples were a bit of a challenge. We used pliers to rip them out.
Finally, we hard bare, never touched (other than the edges of those few bottom steps) beautiful oak stairs.
You can see the little bit of stain on the side of that one step. They
were gorgeous, aside from the over spray where they painted the molding
and got it on the stairs. So, the next fun step began. We decided to
remove the banister and the spindles. Easier to sand, easier to stain,
and easier to paint. I will say, I rarely agree with painting real wood.
I think it is a horrible move, however, I love the look of the painted
spindles and risers on stairs. It gives it so much dimension. So, we
took it all out and ended up with this. We left the handrail. We have
two small children, they need it. Two small kids, three dogs, I must be
out of my mind....
Then, we went through and sanded everything down. It was messy. It was
time consuming, It was well worth it. Then, we went through and stained
every other step. We used Minwax Deep Red Mahogany. Then, after we
stained we coated everything with polyurethane in a semi-gloss. We went
every other step, finished those, then did the other set. And wound up
with this....
After that, I taped everything off to primer and paint. It took almost
an entire roll of tape, it took me almost two hours just to tape and it
still leaked!!
I primered, I painted with Valspar antique white (my new favorite shade
of white) then, I took all that paint off to reveal this...
So much better, brighter and more distinctive!! I am so happy with this
project and it cost me exactly $0. I already had everything on hand, so
it required no extra money out of pocket! Now, that is a project. Next
up, new wall paint colors. I will update photos when I get it painted!
Doesn't it look like a different stairway?! Craziness.
I love to hear from my readers! Please share if you have done a project like this or would like to!
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