carpet Archives

For the record, let me say this: painting your stairs is fairly easy, but very, very time consuming.

This is not a quick weekend project.

I highly recommend painting your stairs if you’re looking for a cheap facelift and/or to buy you some time until you can do a major stair remodel.

That being said … holy cow. This project was a chore. Awesome, but a chore.

If we could have tackled this on it’s own, it would have been fairly straight forward. But since we were now launching into painting the stairs in the middle of painting the entryway floor and door …

… and trying to finish the kitchen pantry …

… and the dishwasher breaking and needing to be hauled up and down those entry stairs and across the disastrous painted floor on not-so-much dry paint …

… and the stairs off the back deck deciding to rot and fall off at the same time leaving no other way to get in and out of the house …

… and not having a working entry light which meant that all painting had to be done during the day with kids around whose bedrooms and playroom are downstairs just made everything more complicated.

So I wasn’t surprised when Mr. Thrive got home the night of the paint-down-the-stairs-onto-the-entryway fiasco and was so, so not happy.

And can you blame him?

But we were committed, so I busted it to get going to try and fix everything in the two weeks left before company rolled into town.

The first thing I did was use a hammer to pull up the carpet tack strips that were nailed to the top of the treads and front of the risers. I had to use a chisel a couple of times to get the tack strips to lift up enough for the hammer to pull them loose.

I hadn’t ripped the carpet off the sides of the stair case or along the railing that first night …

… but the remnant carpet looked lame so off it came, too.

And then hundreds of staples had to get pulled out with pliers.

The super, tiny ones needed a small screw driver hammered underneath them to lift them up enough where I could grab them with pliers.

After four solid hours of ripping out staples and tack strips, I had some wicked awesome blisters. So here’s tip ladies: wear gloves for this part.

At this point I didn’t know how to proceed since as you can see in the picture above, the treads weren’t plywood or hardwood, but rather particle board that is notorious for leaching paint like a sponge. Plus it’s a lot coarser than plywood or hardwood steps. For 30 seconds, I really considered ripping up those cheapy particle board steps and putting down something that could be stained. But at $11 a tread, I was looking at a lot of money I still didn’t have.

So painting it was.

The nice thing about having particle board steps is that you don’t have to sand them down at all—in fact it’s a nightmare to even try. So the stained areas on the steps got a quick spot coat of KILZ …

… and then the whole thing got two heavy coats of oil-based primer.

And I was pleasantly surprised — the particle board took the paint very well. The first coat of primer sucked up a lot of paint and dried very light, but the second coat covered beautifully.

I had hoped two heavy coats of primer would hide all the staple holes everywhere.

Um, no.

After the first coat of primer it was pretty clear that no amount of paint was going to cover those bad boys.

So, tip #2: fill all the holes with wood putty and then sand smooth before priming and painting. It’s a total pain to have to go back to do that step after the painting has started.

Between my super-cautiousness-on-the-drying-times-after-the-floor-mess thing and the afore-mentioned issues with the rotting-back-stairs-and-dishwasher-and-painting-only-during-daylight thing, the prep work took a full week to complete before we were ready to start painting the finish colors.

Phew.

So for anyone wanting to paint their stairs – especially stairs with particle board treads, let’s recap how to do this the smart way.

Painting Your Stairs: Prep Work

1. Remove carpet and pad using pliers and the claw on the back of the hammer.

2. Remove the carpet tack strips with a hammer and chisel.

3. Remove staples using pliers.

4. Patch staple/nail holes with wood putty, allow to dry thoroughly, sand smooth.

5. Sand non-particle board areas like the risers/kick boards and sides of stairs lightly.

6. Sweep stairs and wipe clean.

7. Spot treat any stained areas with KILZ and allow to dry at least 30 minutes.

8. Coat stairs with two coats of oil-based primer, allowing each coat dry thoroughly.

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Back on Friday with the fun part – painting the finish colors!

Thanks for your kind comments on my door painting fail – so glad I’m not the only one who’s screwed up a DIY project.

And I’ll give a quick disclaimer right now: painting your floors can look AWESOME and is a great solution for a cheap face lift until you can replace flooring outright.

However … however, if you rush this project, you’ll screw it up royally and probably wish you had taken help from a professional house painter. Guess which route I took?

Yeah.

After horribly trashing the floor around the door with not one, but two spray painting fiascos, I couldn’t take it anymore and wisely plunged into tackling the floor. I mean, come on … really? How long could you greet friends at the door with a floor that looked like that?

But at the same time … finish one project, woman, and then move on.

The entry floor was covered with the same peel-n-stick vinyl tiles that we have in the kitchen. The original linoleum was a dark, heavy 70’s brown, so the white vinyl was a big improvement. But just like the kitchen floor, these tiles were 10 years old and seriously showing their wear. This is freshly scrubbed.

See? It never looks clean. And that was before several layers of spray paint over spray.

So after a quick wipe down, that floor got two coats of oil based primer.

Seriously, oil based primer is the greatest stuff ever. I was giddy with how much better it all ready looked. I let that dry for a couple days and then rolled on a coat of white semi-gloss paint (what I had on hand).

And then …yup, you guessed it … I went stupid again.

Instead of letting that paint dry for 2-3 days minimum before taping over it, I waited a mere 18 24 hours until it felt dry and started taping away. Laying out the grid was easy …

… I just followed the lines of the vinyl tiles.

Then I rollered on a second coat of white semi-gloss paint over the entire floor to help seal the tape edges so that the next layer of brown paint wouldn’t seep under the tape. Again, only waited a day and then charged ahead with the brown. I rolled on two coats using the same paint I used on the front door. I waited a day, and then started carefully pulling up the tape. And at first, it looked wicked awesome.

But on the second square something really, really bad started to happen: the paint under the tape started coming up. Everywhere. In huge pieces.

Oh, snap.

I wanted to cry … really, really cry.

But I didn’t, because Mr. Thrive wasn’t thrilled about the huge door mess that had created the floor mess that was now a painted floor mess. And I was determined to save this project and actually finish a project for once. So I lightly sanded down the worst of the edges and and carefully started touching up the peeled off areas in each square. (Thankfully just the white semi-gloss lifted and not the primer underneath.) And while not perfect, I was relieved to see that with some patience, it was completely fixable.

Phew.

But … but … after finishing my touch ups, I left the paint tray on the stairs and went upstairs for a minute … and my three year old daughter saw the very full paint tray just sitting there and wanted to help momma with the painting … and she tried to pick it up to go down the stairs and paint … and dropped the heavy tray … and watched all of that white paint land on the carpeted stairs and splatter across the newly painted floor … and then probably panicked that momma would be mad and promptly ran back up the stairs, tracking big paint foot prints on all the steps that hadn’t been covered by the paint to start.

And anytime you have a 1/3 of a gallon land on your floor, you know there’s not a snowballs chance that it’s coming out.

That’s when I cried.

For a full five minutes I lost it and cried like a baby.

But then I took a deep breath … and hugged my baby girl and apologized to her for yelling and being mad when I was the one who left the paint out … and I put my big girl pants on and started to hustle.

Because it was two o’clock in the afternoon … and Mr. Thrive was going to be home at seven … and I didn’t want him to have to walk into that kind of mess … or stress over how on earth we’d pay not only for new flooring in the entryway, but also for the stairs. So I scraped as much of the paint out of the carpet as I could … and wiped all the excess paint off the floor … and took a few quick, crappy pictures to blackmail my children with as my mind raced as to how on earth I was going to fix this mess. (Edited to add: yes, yes I was having flashbacks to this moment.)

Oh, and did I mention that we had company coming in from out a state in just two weeks?

The floor I knew could be repainted. Again.

But the stairs? The only thing I could think off was to rip the carpet off the bottom tread and hurry down to Lowe’s and see if could match it. I knew I couldn’t get it installed before Mr. Thrive got home, but I was hoping that having the replacement stuff already ordered would soften the blow. So I grabbed a hammer and a pair of pliers and started yanking.

Holy cow. We vacuum and sweep twice a day and that’s how much dirt was under the carpet and pad. It’s probably ten years worth … but still. Ewwww.

I was completely grossed out … and even more worried about what to do … but the reality was that I couldn’t afford new carpet—even a small amount of replacement carpet – so the choice was to live with the huge paint stains on the carpet plus one naked tread at the bottom –or- figure out a way to rock-what-ya-got.

And so I took a deep breath … and then another … and then made an executive decision. And I started yanking and pulling and ripping until all of the carpet going upstairs was gone and I was left with this: