DIY Custom Stairs Makeover - Transforming Carpeted Stairs to Oak

DIY Custom Oak Stairs

      One of the features that was most important to me when I was searching for a new home was that I really wanted home with two floors  - I believe the separate floors makes the whole house seem larger, and stairs can be a beautiful design statement.

     In my home, the stairs face the front door, and so changing the stairs was a major design priority for me.  The old stairs were covered in 20 year-old carpeting (gross!) that had definitely seen better days.  

Hideous old carpeting!  It had to go!

   Removing the carpeting takes more effort than I had initially anticipated.  Besides the expected carpet tack strips, there were approximately 1 billion staples in the wood - all of which would have to come out.  I got a blister from staple removal that day.

Exposed under carpeting pads held on by many, many staples.

    The bases of the stairs were raw building-grade plywood.  They made a strong base to build off of, but were unfortunately neither square nor uniform.  This, along with the shape of the bottom 3 stairs (which extended out to the side) was the greatest challenge of the project.  Oak treads can be purchased unfinished from multiple different home improvement stores, and I got my treads from Home Depot.  They were stained with Minwax stain and then sealed with 3 coats of oil-based high-traffic polyurethane.  The risers were made with sheets of MDF, that were painted in my trim white.  The MDF had to be built out from each stair individually to make sure they were a uniform 90 degrees.   

     A simple tool was very helpful for the measurement of the stairs - a pair of angled paddles that can be placed on either end of a board and used to accurately measure the angle and length of each stair tread.  

  The bottom 3 stairs took many hours of measuring, cutting, sanding, and test fitting before they were completed - but the results are stunning!  The new stairs are one of my favorite features of the home, and make a great impression to guests as they enter the house!