Y’all, we’ve wanted to rip up the dingy carpet on our stairs for so long! But we were so scared of what we might find underneath and how much it might cost if what we found underneath wasn’t anything we could work with. But, after awhile, we decided it didn’t really matter what was underneath the carpet…anything would be better than the yucky carpet. Benjamin (my husband) ripped up a little bit of the carpet at the bottom of the step and we saw a mixture of plywood on the risers and a decent piece of wood on the top.

The plywood would have to be dealt with in some way, but I was happy to see that the actual step was made of wood. We pulled up the rest of the carpet. I think the difficulty of this part varies from house to house. The way our steps are made, there weren’t as many staples and glue as I’ve seen on some blogs. This process took about a day. There was lots of paint splatters on the wood and we had to sand down each step.

Now, what to do about the pltboard risers? I brainstormed and decided the best thing (and to get the look I wanted) was to use skinny shiplap. We bought some wood lath from Home Depot. It took two boxes, but we barely used any out of the second box. You might get lucky and it only take one! Benjamin just cut each piece down to the length we needed and used an airgun nailer to attach each piece.

My original plan was to stain the top part of the step and paint the skinny shiplap risers white, but then I saw a picture on Pinterest of white steps with a painted on blue runner. Benjamin had no idea how we would pull this off, but he’s amazing and we figured out a way.

We painted the steps white using Behr’s Porch Floor paint. I used a high gloss because I wanted to easily be able to wipe the steps off. We didn’t paint the entire step, just the places we knew would be white. We let the paint dry for a little more than 24 hours and then taped off the blue runner. This was a lot of trial and error. I used Dark Navy by Behr for the runner in the Marquee paint. It did amazing for the top part of the step, but we had a lot of bleeding on the shiplap riser part.

When we realized we were having an issue with the bleeding, we tried a different approach with the second part of the stairs. We used the white paint to create a barrier on the tape (if this makes sense…pretty hard to explain). After the white paint dried, we painted over it with the blue (using two coats), waited for it to dry, and then pulled up the tape, hoping it didn’t bleed through again.

It did bleed through, but not quite as bad. To fix the bleeding, we used a sponge applicator and went back and touched it up with the white paint. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for me! 🙂