How To Change Your Stairs From Carpet to a Wood Finish

Basically some while ago we had some really nice wooden stairs fitted in our house. For some reason in one of our spontaneous shopping sprees, we decided that carpet would look good out stairs. It was an impulsive decision that we made because I guess we were looking for an excuse to buy some carpet. I turned out to be a stupid decision and it actually took away the character of the staircase.

It was a shame because we went through so much effort with www.mrstairs.com to design the staircase online and then have them custom build them for us. Why we then covered the wood up with carpet was a decision I will never get my head around. We asked Mr Stairs if we could get rid of the carpet and being quite DIY savvy ourselves, we managed to restore the stairs to their original state.

Here is how we did it:

We have a big problem because there are spindles and they’re included or on the inside of the stair treads, so it would be a really expensive proposition to have removed the carpeting and have new stair treads put on.

As such, I decided to tear down the carpeting and just to refinish the stair treads, and I’m doing this in conjunction with a staircase design expert.

I decided to chronicle it in this blog so that I can show you how I got around this problem. Despite, how much work it was, I thought I had nothing to lose because we needed to replace the carpeting. So if it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it, I could just replace the carpeting anyway.

I’m going to get started and I’m going to tell you what I did to get to this finished result from carpeted stairs to a wood-look. I’ve started by tearing the carpeting down, I also had to cover up the ragged edges somehow and I haven’t decided what I’m going to do about that yet. Instead, I’ll explain at the end of this article as this is a bit of a work in progress – I was writing this as went along in my notebook.

Next, I had to remove all the paint without going through the effort of removing the spindles. This is one of the main reasons this was a really tedious job. Plus, I needed to remove the rough sections around the spindles.

Once I was done, I wet it down with a vinegar and water solution. At this stage, I’ve got all the stairs cracked wood filled and I’ve got them all sanded down. I tried several different solid colour stains, and they weren’t really the right colour, so what I wound up doing was buying this porch and patio floor paint and then I mixed three different colours to get the colour that I wanted. This ended up a dark brown.

I also needed to tan the color and then. I just got my brush so that there was just a little on it and I spread it very thin. You could still see these areas where there was wood filler.

While it’ was still wet, I then went over it and put extra paint in those sections and the strokes all blended nicely. I went ahead and did every step like this.

After I had the treads the way I liked them then I just took a dry brush and I made these streaks with the lightest colour that I had. When I was happy with the way the treads looked I went ahead and I coated them with the diamond finish water-based interior Verathane, a shiny durable finish.

So That’s it that’s how I went from carpeting on my stairs to this new fresh look and I’m pretty happy with that for now.