Refinishing the Basement Stairs

When Chris told me he would get three weeks paternity leave when Ivy was born, I had a feeling this could spell trouble. While it was great having him home so long, I haven't seen him sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time during our 5+ years of marriage (except when he sleeps through the BBC Pride & Prejudice, which I believe every husband should be required to watch once a year).

Well, it turns out my suspicions were correct! The day after we brought home our newborn, our house rung out with the sounds of random orbital sanding and nail gunning. He had decided to attack our gross basement stairs, which run off the kitchen.

During our kitchen remodel, our nasty old water-damaged kitchen floor was replaced with new hardwoods. The new boards stop under the basement door, and from that point on the floor is covered with original, very roughed-up hardwoods that were painted white at some point.

Before: gross stairs and landing.

Public service announcement: White painted floors do not wear well, and look dirty all the time.

Ok, back to business here. So, from the kitchen door there are three steps down to a landing, where the stairs turn and continue down to the basement. Chris decided to tackle from the kitchen door to the landing, as this portion of the stairs is actually visible from the kitchen when we open the door. We'll probably get to the remaining stairs someday, but they're much less of a priority.

Based on our usual mindset that we like to reuse materials whenever it makes sense, the original plan was to refinish flooring by the kitchen door and on the landing, and replace the old stair treads with new ones. However, as Chris got the boards stripped and sanded, the boards at the top of the steps were pretty rough underneath.

The old, stripped boards just can't keep up with the pretty kitchen floor.

These beaten up, gaping boards looks especially bad next to the kitchen floorboards, which were installed and finished just two years ago. Fortunately, we had just enough board left over from the remodel to replace board in the area, which looked much better. He purchased a few new red oak treads at our local home improvement store and replaced the three stair treads, and stuck with our original plan to strip and sand down the original oak floorboards on the landing to prepare these boards to be restained and finished.

The newly installed floorboards blend into the kitchen flooring. 

Old stair treads are removed (giving a lovely view of the water heater) and Chris sized new treads prior to installing.

Chris is a big fan of Citristrip - a non toxic and minimally stinky way to remove gooey paint. He paints it on, lets it sit overnight and scrapes it off with a putty knife.

The project drug on a while because we needed access to the basement from time to time, so he could not just keep applying stain and polyurethane over and over. We had to take the occasional break between coats to do laundry and get groceries from our deep freeze, so this really was a great project to tackle while we were both home from work.

Plus, we figured while we had the area all torn up, we needed to do some work to the trim and walls in order to really get full payoff for the hard work. Chris capped the existing baseboards for a more finished look, and installed new shoe molding. We caulked and painted all the trim, and I painted the walls using leftover Sherwin Williams Dorian Gray from Ivy's nursery.

Once the work was all done, the area was quickly transformed.

   

The old trim got a major facelift with some sanding and caulking, and a new cap piece attached.

The landing flooring is a bit more rustic than the rest of our wood floors, but we decided we are good with that and chose not to replace all the floorboards. We'll look for a nice doormat to put inside the door anyway, which will cover all that you see from the kitchen. And while distressed looking, the boards are perfectly smooth underfoot - which is the most important part for us!

While some may find it strange to invest this much time in basement stairs, we are thrilled with the improvement! Even if no one sees it but us we feel it was a very worthwhile effort, improving an area that we use every day for very little cost.