Staircase Remodel | Otsego, MN

Construction2style
by Construction2style
From carpet to wood treads, we are finally here to talk about our staircase remodel!
When you walk into our house, the first thing that you see is our staircase. So when we were thinking about the remodel we knew we wanted it to be very eye catching. As you can see the former staircase had dark maroon carpet with a black wrought iron handrail. We knew the awesome potential this outdated stairwell had when we first toured the home before we had put in an offer.
First thing first was tearing up all of the old carpet.


As I mentioned before, originally we weren’t entirely sure what we wanted to do with the staircase. But being the staircase is the first thing you see when you walk into the house we wanted it to stand out. We were debating between all dark wood treads with white handrails, mixing the dark and light, and/or having carpet down the middle of the staircase.
Once we got the carpet torn up, we removed the handrail. Jamie took an electric saw and cut apart the rail in pieces. We were also able to salvage the handrail and use it at Jamie’s grandma’s for an outdoor handrail.
Once the carpet had been torn up and the handrail was removed we had to come up with a game plan of how we wanted this staircase to look.Jamie knew he was going to build his own handrail, he just wasn’t sure exactly on how he was going to do it. After a couple of different attempts, we ended up deciding to have a few posts placed within the stairwell with spindles all the way up. The tricky part was going to be how to make the middle curved piece of the handrail.


Jamie ended up taking a few pieces of oak and gluing them together. He placed 2×4 wood blocks on the treads of the stairs for support and temporarily screwed them into the stairs. He then bent the wood so that the handrail was leveled and used c-clamps to hold it into place. He let the rail sit in place for 24 hours so the glue would dry.


Once the handrail was warped into place he removed the wood blocks that he had screwed into the staircase to help warp the handrail. He was then ready to build the treads.
Jamie used oak wood and cut and placed the pieces over top the stairs and nailed them into place.


Once the new oak wood treads were in place he had to secure the posts.
Jamie placed wood backer blocks into the stairs. He then glued and nailed the backer blocks into the middle of the posts. The bottom post and stairs at the base of the stairwell had to be cut so the rail would line up to the end of the stairs.


Once everything was in place, it was time to paint. We ended up mixing the light and dark colors. We used winwax wood stain for the top of the stairs and handrails. The stain we chose had a sealer in it so we did not finish the stairs with any poly. For the risers, spindles, and posts we used Behr white paint.


After we removed the frog tape we had very minimal stain that had bled onto the white paint. In those areas we just went back over and touched them up with white paint.


At first we painted the spindles already installed into the handrail. However, it was a bit tricky to paint so for the spindles down the handrail we painted them first before securing them into place.


Once the spindles had dried we got them glued and nailed into place. Per code, spindles have to be 4 inches minimum apart. We ended up buying the spindles at Menards.
We are thrilled with the results of our staircase remodel! It was better than we had imagined!
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