Here's the closest I have to a before picture,and it really doesn't do justice to the situation:
This is Christmas morning. Notice the left hand edges of each step? Yup. Kitty scratched like crazy. The bottom steps were HORRIBLE. So were the two steps into the kitchen. PLUS the edge of several of the steps were very worn, almost to having holes, just from traffic.
I'd toyed with the idea of getting new carpet, but besides the money issue, I knew that cats would just continue scratching and ruin the new carpet. Plus, I hate carpet, so why spends hundreds of dollars to recarpet my stairs? But I was afraid to pull it up... afraid of what I'd find. Maybe it couldn't just be painted. Maybe it'd need even more money thrown at it just to be usable again...
But, I finally got brave (or desperate) enough to do it.
There was, of course, crazy amounts of dust and dirt. Super disgusting.
On the risers of the two steps to the kitchen... paint.
And on the treads... asphalt tiles.
It became pretty clear that those tiles were not coming off without serious, major, exhaustive effort, if ever.
After some intensive head scratching. We came up with a solution. We bought a cheap wood panel at the hardware store, cut it to size, glued it down on the treads and stained it. We hid the visible "seam" on the front edge with rubber (and brown!) stair edging. So much better!
And to cover the painted risers?? Brown chalkboard paint... because that's what I had on hand (leftover from making the kitchen chalkboard). And as long as I'm using chalkboard paint I might as well be a little trendy.
The rest of the staircase was in much better shape.
A couple coats of stain was all it needed.
So, so, so much better!
Project total (for stain, board and edging - everything else we had on hand): under $30.
No comments:
Post a Comment