Our main floor to second floor stairs were carpeted. During demo they tore out all the carpet and I found some wood stair treads under the carpet. We were really hoping we could update the stairs to be wood with a runner instead of fully carpeted, but apparently this is a “whole thing”. There are a lot of code restrictions around stairs (including step height, width, depth, hand rails, landings, and variation between steps etc). According to my measurements our existing stairs are already pushing the height limit so if we start trying to rebuild them theoretically we could fail inspection so we are best off just working with what we have. Sometimes you can put a thin veneer or cover piece over the top of existing stair treads to quickly update them, but between the existing height and the problem with matching the veneers with the existing floors, I don’t think this will be and easy fix.

The bottom few steps and landing were modified more recently and are made of plywood with just a bullnose piece of real wood added on for the edge.

I sanded down a few of the upper steps to see what we were working with after I pulled all the nails and staples and scraped off the adhesive and carpet padding. **Yes I did this myself, the workers probably think I am crazy, but I just had to know if we could use the existing wood stairs and my contractor kept saying it was too hard or would be too expensive. We are running out of money so I just got in there and got a little dirty!

The remaining 11 steps are all solid wood… I thought it looked like red oak, but my contractor said it was pine. I will consult with a professional wood floor installed to get the final verdict.

Either way it looks like our choices are:

1) finish cleaning up all steps and replace landing and bottom two step treads with wood to match remaining steps, then stain (if wood is amenable and will match close enough to main flooring) or paint white, and install carpet runner (for safety and to cover up what will inevitably be imperfect stairs).

2) if option 1 won’t work, just re-carpet the whole thing like it was before and forget about it.