Our 90’s Staircase Makeover

This is the stairs a fews years ago, golden oak for days, super cheap glue down carpet. (you know the stuff with the pad attached that Menards has for 90 cent’s a yard on the roller?) Yep, this entire house was carpeted with that before we bought it.

As you know, we’ve spent the last year replacing carpet with LVP, the stairs were one if the last places to have carpet. Here’s a few more before photos, I painted the banister white last year and while it really looked better, it always needed something else.

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Our plan-

The makeover plan was to tear out the carpet, tear out the old pine treads, remove all staples from the risers, replace the treads with new stained pine treads, install painted antique tin tile on the risers. We also planned too paint the top rail of the banister and possibly have a carpet runner.

We purchased our stair treads at Home Depot… still kicking myself for not reading reviews. You see, we bought pine treads instead of oak thinking they can be stained. (In the past, we’ve stained pine and it’s been beautiful). Well not so much on these, my husband sanded all the treads and we applied Prestain, then the first coat of stain which was Special Walnut from Minwax. I was going to second coat the stain with a gray stain so the wood was coordinating with our LVP flooring. Here is what the stain looked like on the compressed Pine treads…

I was soooo disappointed, the pine doesn’t take stain apparently. I envisioned pretty stained stairs for so long and there was no way it was happening now. sigh! Moral of this diy fail, spend the money (double for oak $$) and do not buy these if you want stained treads. Next step, choose a paint to coordinate with our floors, I chose Mushroom Bisque a neutral warm tan, by Behr paint. Black would’ve been pretty as well, but I refuse to put dark floors down because they show every speck of dust and dog hair.

After the treads were repainted and installed- it was time for tin tile.

Matt installed all the treads using the air compressor and small brad nailer. I filled the small holes with nail fill and sanded. We then were ready for the tin tile. We laid all the tile out in the garage and painted it BLACK! (Oh if you ever find and use antique tin ceiling tiles, you’ll need electric shears to cut it accurately.) Y’all- this post is all over the place, isn’t it?? LOL!

Ok, to install the tin tile, Matt nailed it all carefully to the existing old risers. Also, yes, we had painted them black because I saw black risers on Pinterest and thought it was a pretty look.

Here’s the thing with the black paint… it basically hid the beautiful reclaimed tin tile. If you peered real close you could tell what is was. This project was getting super frustrating guys, but I knew I needed to paint them white.

You can see the detail SO MUCH BETTER! This did end up taking forever. because I had to caulk around the top and bottom of the tin tile and paint the tiles as well as touch up the stair paint.

Time to carpet the treads

You’ll notice in the above photo that there is white carpet tape on them. After much debate we decided to carpet only the stair treads. If you were to run a carpet runner all the way down, you would hide the tile that we had worked so hard on.

For the stair runner I wanted to keep it neutral because I have a colorful runner in the entryway right beside it. Also, I believe that keeping things neutral means you can change accessories around them very easily. Here is the runner that I chose from Amazon.

I failed to take good photos of this process (haha bad blogger)! We laid the runner out flat upside down. To cut it, use a sharp razor blade against a flat surface. So lay a yardstick across the runner perpendicular and then run your razor blade against that, hope that makes sense.

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I read in a decorating Magazine years ago, a designer said that using black in design was like using mascara for your eyes. It makes it pop! Don’t you agree? While using black on the risers wasn’t a good idea, It was definitely a good idea on the banister.

Thanks for joining me! Have a great week!