In our home, there were the most awful stairs ever. They are the stairs that kicked off our re-model project because the tall people living here were tired of hitting their heads or ducking. The stairs that have been occasionally slipped on with cheap carpet. The stairs that have walls that nobody bothered to do more than put on a coat of primer, not even adding a layer of texture or mud.

After  we lowered them down so we didn’t hit our head, I decided I did not want to keep big-box special awful tan carpet on them. I had seen blog post of people who removed the carpet and had painted or stained them, and thought we could do the same. This is what we were left with after carpet removal:

Painting them didn’t seem like a good option. They were not in good shape. There were gaps, uneven boards, rough surfaces. I had looked at stair restoration kits, but they added up to more than I wanted to spend.

I despaired for bit, but got creative and found a solution. First of all, Joe attacked the stairs with a hammer and took out no less than fifty nails that some idiot, incompetent or drunk construction worker with a nail gun had nailed in our stairs with little regard to where they went. They were not holding anything together, but were making the stairs quite squeaky.

After nailing in less than half that amount, almost all the gaps in the stairs were gone, and the stairs no longer sounded like stepping on a mouse nest.

Joe and I took a trip to big-box store. (It was a date with a babysitter, because doing so with kids is a nightmare. But then I feel sheepish that my dates are to stores, because that’s what my parents did growing up and I thought it was kinda lame, but now I’m doing it.) Then I did my work of taking the kids away for an entire day and Joe worked on the stairs and I came back to this:

Out of all the things we’ve done to the house, this was probably the biggest transformation. It’s not done yet at all; one main reason is because the can of stain we bought was mis-labeled, halting the process of staining the new treads.

I watched stair kit restoration videos, and checked online stock and googled a bit. I came up with the idea of resurfacing the back with wainscot beadboard (about $25 for the whole sheet and we had extra), and putting on new stair treads (about $100 for pine stair treads). The stair treads did raise up the stairs by one inch, but there was actually an extra inch at the top stair anyway after creating the new landing.

I’ve got more in store for these stairs, just as soon as we get the right stain color.