Hello everyone!  I hope you are all enjoying this beautiful weather!  Summer seems to be coming much faster this year than last year, and I’ve been tackling all sorts of yard projects already.  I wanted to talk today about how we took our stairs from this:

To this:

It really was a joint effort between the hubs and I.  I originally had thought that we could remove the carpet and refinish the wood underneath.  Wrong.  The wood underneath was cheap pressboard and it definitely wouldn’t have worked.  After doing some research, we decided to replace the stair treads (the piece you step on) with a redwood oak plank.  Oak is known for being a hard wood that would hold up well to high traffic.  We also replaced the risers with pine.  Pine is super soft, but no one is stepping on that piece, so pine works fine.

I started by sanding each tread

I started with 100 grit sandpaper to get out the deeper scratches, then went over each tread again with 150 to really smooth them out.

Next I stained each one with a Minwax stain in Jacobean. It was really convenient that we were going to replace our carpet afterwards.  I just stained right inside the house.

Here are all of the treads laying out to dry

Once they dried I decided that they were too dark brown and I wanted a little red, so I applied a second coat of stain right on top of the first one in Minwax Red Oak.  I was thrilled with how they turned out.  The Red Oak stain really made them feel richer.  After they had dried for 24 hours I lined them all up and applied two coats of wipe- on polyurethane.

As they were drying I moved on to the risers.  I laid them all out and used a small foam roller to apply two coats of oil based paint.

Oil based paint can be tricky to work with.  You must let each coat dry for 24 hours before you can apply another coat.  It then takes at least 24 hours to completely cure. The reason I went with oil based was because it dries to a much more durable finish.  I knew there would be lots of shoes and things kicking those risers, so I needed them to be durable.

My hubs went to work removing each pressboard tread and replacing them with the newly stained treads.  It was really tough work.  He didn’t want to damage the molding around the stairs jerking each one out and the were not only nailed, but also glued.

At one point he smashed his thumb really hard and I think the neighbors probably heard the cuss storm following that one.

After putting in all of the treads we went to work on the risers.  I don’t have any pictures of this part, but basically we nailed the new risers right to the front of the old ones.

   When the risers were in we put the molding back up and I went to work filling in the gaps with caulk.  Caulk is like the best product ever invented.  You can make a job that has many imperfections look flawless with caulk.

I patched the nail holes with spackle then sanded lightly before touching it all up with paint for the last time.

And there you have it!  Beautiful solid wood stairs!

It was a ton of work, but well worth it!  In the future I may put a small carpet runner on them….or I may not.  I’m just glad that I have the option to do it either way.  It makes a huge impact when you walk in the door.

Have a great day, and thanks for coming by!