Our staircase in the old farmhouse was looking a bit tatty and boring. We had a frayed brown carpet stair runner over white painted stairs that were peeling - and they annoyed me every time I walked up them! Time for a revamp.
Before:
First, we considered stripping the old white gloss paint off the stairs and repainting to freshen them up. However, in a fit of uncharacteristic diligence, we sent a sample of the existing paint off to get tested for lead...and unfortunately it came back with "non-negligible levels"! There were still safe ways of proceeding, but most were way too much faff. So, we bought some oak stair treads and thick oak nosing to just cover the existing treads. We stained them with a tinted osmo polyx oil which had non-slip properties, and stuck them on! Much simpler, and ended up with a beautiful thick-cut oak staircase - nobody needs know that it is just "cladding"!
Then, we bought twelve strips of thin ply sheeting, cut precisely to the size of the risers. Finally, the fun bit! I painted the base colours with small wood paint testers, and created an almost concrete-like finish on some by using a darker or lighter tone sponged over. My colour scheme was a mixture of dark and light browns, cream and gold. There was a specific reason for this - we have light oak flooring at the bottom of the stairs and dark wood at the top - so I wanted to find some way of blending those two tones together...
I then used some beautiful self-adhesive stencils with other colours from my colour scheme, along with some metallic gold accents. Finally I sealed it all with two coats of matt clear varnish, hopefully to protect it all from scrapes and scuffs!
I think it turned out quite well for a first attempt! The metallic gold makes it hard to photograph as it reflects the light, but you get the idea:
Comments