What’s up everyone!?! I’m back today to share the second part of our basement makeover! You can read the first part by clicking here. The second part in this basement makeover we’re tackling the stairs! Yesssss! The literal and figurative connection between two floors. You can’t leave that untouched! Well, at least we couldn’t! Our stairs were boring and brown. Someone had painted over them before many times I’m sure. But the brown was worn and looked dirty and we really wanted to freshen up the space. So we wanted to figure out how to paint basement stairs. And figure it out we did!
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How to Paint Basement Stairs
Honestly it was a pretty easy project for how much better it makes the space look. So, I really can’t give you much of a tutorial on how to paint basement stairs as much as I can just show you how we did it and tell you to go do it. I will start off by saying that these stairs were already wood. They were painted, but they were wood. Not any fancy kind of wood stairs, just the kind you typically find in the basement.
Maybe they were meant to be covered with carpet or some type of vinyl, so no one ever bothered to make them look pretty. And if you have been reading up on our renovations, you’ll know that we at this point don’t have the time, energy, money, or desire to make these stairs look all fancy pants. We were in the middle of selling our house, and the basement we thought was making buyers drag their feet about putting in an offer.
So, when we decided to paint the basement walls and floor, we didn’t want to have the stairs stay the way they were. Well, because they were just ‘meh’. And I wanted them to be as cute and have as much character as an old wood basement staircase possibly could without putting too much time or effort…or money into it. An to be honest this project was free because we already had the supplies on hand! We just used the leftover paint from the basement floor project, and leftover trim paint that we always have on hand, some painters tape, and got to work!
You will need:
Trim Paint
Paint Rollers (Get the ones made for rough surfaces)
1) Obviously you want to be sure your surfaces are clean and dry, so start there. We used oxyclean for this project because it was the closest thing we could find to nuclear power.
2) The first paint we put down was the white trim paint. We painted the wall-stringer with a fresh coat of trim paint, then painted the risers and treads about 10 inches in on both sides. We just wanted to paint enough to overlap the next color, which we taped off. A few coats of white to cover up the brown was sufficient. Then we let it all dry.
3) The only step that was remotely precise was my half-assed attempt at measuring the distance from each end of each step so that I could place the painters tape in an approximately same location on each step. But even that was mostly an eyeball job. Because by measure, I mean that I looked at the end, looked at the tape, and sort of moved the tape until I thought it looked pretty close to the previous piece of tape I put on the previous step. You know, eyeball it.
4) Once I had all the tape where I wanted it to go, pressed everything down really well and started rolling over it on the inside of the taped area with the same blue paint we used on the basement floor. Just for full disclosure here, this stuff didn’t say its meant for basement stairs…but it didn’t not say it. Am I right? It is meant for floors though, so I think we’re ok. Besides, free is free. And I had enough of the floor paint leftover to make this project super free.
5) We painted to our hearts’ content, peeled up the tape before the paint was dry, and tried not to step on any blue while we tip toed up the stairs. And now our basement stairs are the fairest in all the land. We did also patch and paint the walls and ceiling so now everything is fresh! <3
One last before and after for you!
and that’s my tutorial? ish? on how to paint basement stairs. Basically just do it. You can’t make it any worse than they are. 🙂
