Cosmetic surgery for a stairs

Sep 11, 2006 6 Replies

Hi All,



We are looking to give a stairs a facelift. We have a stairs that was covered by soiled carpet that runs from the back of our Kitchen down a narrow hall to the back garden. Its the only part of our massonette that's covered by carpet and we had hoped for a wooded stairs underneath that we could sand. However after removing the carpet we discovered a hodge podge of cracked wooden steps and a few concrete steps near the bottom. Also the risers aren't in great shape. It looks like any spare bits of wood was used to create the risers, and in places they have rectangular pieces of laminate tiles stuck to them which the tackless strips where glued or nailed to.



Anyway in its current state we can't sand and refurbish the stairs, we dont want to install a new stairs and we would prefer not to re-carpet it. So is there anything that we could stick over the current wooden and concert steps and Risers that would give it a face lift other that carpet.



A

"veneer" it with real wood or laminate or whatever.

I guess you could cover everything with thin plywood, and varnish it with a flooring grade nonslip varnish. As long as its done neatly you then get neat wood stairs.

Another option is to just use very thin wood on the non-wood bits then stain everything black, this should hide the differences between the wood types, if you like black wood. This might also work with other strong stain colours like red - but I've not tried that.

NT

It's very difficult to clad a poor condition staircase with timber and get visually good results - even for a professional joiner. I'd suggest a combination of plywood cladding to get all the treads perfectly level and stiff underfoot, and an equal rise between them, and the same for the risers. Then something like a hessian carpet professionaly fitted to hide the cosmetic discontinuities.

If you pop into the Geant hypermarket in Beziers, they have exactly what you are looking for on one of the temporary displays in the main entrance area - a commercial product designed to cover old stairs, available in a variety of finishes. Unfortunately, I didn't take a note of the company, as it was not of interest to me at the time.

Colin Bignell

If it's that cladding system you see around markets in France, run away.

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