Category: Renovation

Someday we plan to get carpet again for our upstairs bedrooms, hallway, and stairs. For now, however, we have a cat. If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ve seen at least a few projects of mine that came about out of necessity because we needed to get rid of old flooring. I will say, the cat has forced me to get creative. 😜

Around two years, ago, I pulled the carpet off our stairs because of 1) cat and 2) it was 22 years old and consequently quite gross even without the cat’s help. My temporary fix at the time was to paint the stairs white to match the trim work, but obviously white stairs were doomed to fail too. So, this week, I finally got around to making wood-colored treads to hide dirt, crumbs, dog hair, etc.

If you live in a house built in the 90s, you should probably be prepared to not find real, nice wood treads and risers when pulling up carpet. Instead, my treads were like a porous, MDF kind of wood. Also, there was a gap on either end of the stair pieces because of how they left room for the house to settle – my gaps were huge! Like many things I’ve found in our house, the original builders did not have future remodeling in mind when they did what they did.

Anyway, because we do plan someday to put carpet back on the stairs, I didn’t want to shell out $30-80 per stair for real wood stair treads. I could’ve salvaged the existing risers and just put trim on the ends to cover those gaps, but even just buying wood to make my own treads without risers, that was a lot of $$$.

I have gotten weirdly good at making non-wooden things look like real wood, so I decided to give it a go with paint and stain I already had.

My cost for this final part of my stair fix was $0, but even counting the earlier supplies I’d needed 2 years ago, it was still under $200 for this whole stair makeover. That would have been the same amount as about 4-5 stairs if I’d bought treads. I have 14 stairs.

Step 1: Remove carpet from stairs. This was gross and not fun, I won’t lie. But once I tore it all off and got all the little staples out, it immediately felt worth it. (No pictures of this step because it was a lot of my butt on camera. LOL.)

Step 2: Cover any landings. If you have a landing or two, you’ll want to cover them so it’s not just the rough subfloor. Our staircase has 2 landings, so I covered these with 1/8 inch plywood in a herringbone pattern like I’d done to our upstairs hallway floor. (So, if you need to know how to do herringbone, see that post “DIY Herringbone Floor in a Hallway.”) You could do just one big piece of plywood if you don’t want to bother with the herringbone, but I really like how they turned out.

For the stair-side of the landing, I used outside corner guard molding to cover the edge. I was initially worried about the slight lip this would create, but it turned out not to be an issue. To cover the other sides around my landing where there was existing trim work, I used InstaTrim to cover the edges. But, as I’ll explain below, hold off on the InstaTrim until you’re done painting and staining!

Step 3: InstaTrim. Again, do this step last! But since I’d pulled my carpet 2 years ago, I’d done this step already and so had to work with the InstaTrim already on – hence, you’ll see it in all the pictures. So, I might as well explain how I did it here.

My biggest problem was figuring out how to cover the gaps on the ends of my stairs, because they were not equally spaced and way too wide for any kind of caulk solution. The risers could’ve used normal quarter-round trim, but the treads had curved fronts where ordinary trim wouldn’t have worked. So, I found InstaTrim at a size that would cover the widest areas of my gaps.

Starting at the top of my stairs, I went down one side and then the other, sticking the InstaTrim all along the ends of the risers, across the ends of the treads, over the curved lips of the treads, and down onto the next riser again. It sticks on fairly well with its own adhesive, but I did add a few little nails here and there under the tread fronts to help hold the trim in place. I also had to start a new strip at one point, so I nailed those ends too.

For a few of the absolutely enormous gaps, I also filled in along the InstaTrim with a bit of paintable caulk.

Once that was on, my end gaps were covered!

The InstaTrim is paintable, which was fortunate for me since mine was already down and I’d need to do touchups once I was done painting the treads and the landings. 🤦‍♀️ BUT if you wait to add this trim last, that would be way, way easier!!

Step 4: Paint the landings and treads and risers with non-skid paint. Because my stairs were made from very basic materials, I needed to prime the “wood” to make sure knots and other discolorations didn’t show through. I also wanted to make sure the stairs weren’t too slippery when painted. To solve this problem, I used a non-skid paint intended for stairs. It had a gritty texture to it which helped give the stairs a base layer that wasn’t slippery.

If you’ll need to use these stairs while you’re doing this project, it’s a good idea to do every other stair as you work from the top down. That way, you still have every other stair to use while the first set dries. Once those are dry and you can stand/sit on them again, you can go back up and paint the stairs you skipped.

Painting the stairs with this gritty paint was as far as I got two years ago. You can see from my picture below why I needed to do something other than just this white! 🤦‍♀️ So, I finally got onto the next step this week!

Step 5: Paint a base, light brown. Like the step above, you may want to paint every other stair at a time if you need to use them while they dry. I fortunately had shipped my kids off to their Grammy’s for a few days, so I didn’t have anyone using the stairs all day. This meant that I could simply start at the top and do all of my stairs and landings as I painted my way down.

I originally thought I would make both the risers and treads look stained like wood, so I painted both in a light brown color. However, I ended up painting the risers white to lighten up the stairwell again (and it looked better with the trim work of the stairwell). If you KNOW you want your risers white, simply paint those white now instead of brown. Just be sure to use a fine brush to create a straight line where the risers and treads meet at the back of each stair. And if you’re doing white, be sure to paint in good lighting and do at least 2 coats.

For the treads and landings, I applied just one simple coat of the light brown. It doesn’t have to be perfect since the stain will cover and add “character” anyway to cover paint streaks or areas not covered as well.

I let this dry for several hours. You want to make sure the brown paint adheres really well so it doesn’t wipe off with the next steps.

Step 6: Stain over the paint. I thought I’d use a silicone basting brush like I’d done before when making faux-wood beams and my faux-wood light fixture, but that would have taken forever. I decided instead to try just dipping gloved fingers into the stain and wiping it on with my hands, and that actually worked really well! You don’t want to do it too thick, just enough to add a kind of wood grain look over the light brown. It was also nice to use my fingers because I could get right up along the edges. (Yes, too close to the edges, but I knew I’d have to touch up and paint the risers white anyway. You could tape things off for cleaner lines.)

I suppose you could use a brush, but it really helps the “wood” to look natural if you can rub the stain on with your hand. A brush can look too uniform with strokes. Plus, it’s important that the stain gets rubbed into the paint to help it set. I also found that I could make nice, long wipes across the entire length of the treads to make it look like one, natural board of wood without broken up strokes.

I also made sure to wipe the stain around the curve of the tread fronts. I really rubbed it in here to cover the porous texture of the MDF.

For this staining step, I would definitely recommend doing every other stair if you’ll need your stairs. If you need to step on your landings, leave those until later as well. Long story short, I tried to do it all in one go like I’d done with the brown paint, but the stain needs a LONG time to dry.

If you’re staining the risers as well as the treads, you’ll want to do that as you stain every other stair as well – really, you could stain all the risers as you go, since you won’t be stepping on them while they dry anyway. The stain REALLY ends up covering imperfections like dents, staple holes, etc., so it would look very nice to do both the treads and the stairs. However, for my stairwell, it would have made everything too dark, so again that’s why I ended up painting my risers white.

Step 7: Wipe off excess stain. Once every other stair’s stain has been on for about 6-8 hours, you might be concerned if it hasn’t dried and is still sticky. No worries! Because you were smarter than me and did every other stair, you can take a rag to the top stained tread and wipe off as much extra/wet stain as you can. This actually helps it look even more like natural wood! Work your way down the stairs – standing on the unstained stairs – and wipe each tread and/or riser until you like the look of them.

Step 8: Add a coat of polyurethane. You can do this immediately after the above step. I used a brush and took a quart of clear gloss polyurethane to my top tread. Easily and quickly, I brushed a good coat of poly over the stained tread. If you stained your risers, give them a coat of poly too. Work your way all the way down to the bottom stained stair, then let it dry for an hour or two – mine dried really fast.

It would seem that the polyurethane might make the stairs slippery, but the stain and that non-skid paint on the base layer add a lot of texture. In the end, all of this makes the stairs feel more like real wood, too.

Step 9: Finish every other stair and landings. Once the poly is dry, you can now step on these finished treads and go back to stain the treads and landings that you skipped before. So, repeat steps 6-8 for these treads and also any landings. When staining the landings, make sure to wipe one herringbone board at a time to keep them looking like their own pieces of wood. If you do one big board for your landings, just keep the strokes going all in one direction.

Step 10: Touchups. Like I said, I changed my mind and painted my risers white once I had my treads and landings done. Obviously it would have been less work to paint them white before staining. BUT I also liked that I didn’t have to be too careful when staining along the back of my treads, since I knew I could make a nice clean line with my white paint in the end (I don’t always trust tape to give me good lines).

I also had to repaint my InstaTrim, but you should be able to spare yourself that. However, if you make goofs or change your mind about your risers as you go, know that it’s not too late to make fixes! One of the nice things about touching up once the poly is on is that paint wipes off of dried polyurethane pretty nicely with a wet wipe or damp cloth!

Step 11: InstaTrim. Like I said, it would be smart to save this step for last. This way, you don’t get any of your paint or stain on it! (See step 3 for how to attach it.) I will say that, for my landings, the InstaTrim was much easier to put on because I was only dealing with straight lines and no curves like with the treads.

Now my stairs are finally done! This was actually easier than I thought it would be…and should be even easier for you if you follow my instructions rather than guess as you go like I did. 😆

It’s been a few days now with my girls and dogs and husband using the stairs, and I’m happy to report they hide dirt and hair WAY better than my white stairs. Go figure. LOL.

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