Adventures in Renovating: The Stairs

The stairs have been an eye sore since the second or third week we lived in our house, which is unfortunate because it's the first thing you see when you walk in our house! The previous owners put a stair runner down that was a nice rug in good condition, but it didn't match anything in our house. Just after we moved in our house, Shiloh was nervously waiting by the front door for us to get home one day, so she decided to start chewing on one of the edges. And so the problem began. Little by little, the rug continued to fray until nearly the entire side of the first step had been unraveled. It looked awful.

Before

Before

This past December (2008), Daniel and I decided to host a Christmas Party. This was our motivation to do something about our stair runner. We could either buy a new one or refinish the steps. We chose the latter and knew we had to work quickly because we only had one week until our party! So, exactly a week before the big day, we started refinishing the steps. After making a run to Home Depot, Daniel started pulling up the old rug as well as the tack strips and leftover nails in the wood. That afternoon and the following day, I spent hours sanding. I used an electric hand-held sander, which got the job done, but took hours!

Each day after work, we would work for a few hours on the steps to ensure they would be done by Saturday. Daniel was called to Atlanta for work Tuesday through Thursday, which meant I was now in charge of finishing them. One day I stained every other step (since I needed to be able to go upstairs when I wanted) and painted the vertical risers the color of our trim. The next day I stained the other half of the stairs and then painted the risers again with a second coat of paint.

I'm smiling in this picture, but I'm really not that happy.

Sanded and ready to be stained

The good news is that the stairs looked great by Saturday and most of our guests didn't even know that we had been up late the night before making food and staining our stairs! We did, however, run out of time to put a clear coat on them, but that could wait until after our party was over. It was a lot of hard work I wouldn't have wanted to do in a week, but in the end it was worth it, and we're very glad we took the plunge. The great thing is, we were able to refinish the steps for about $100!