How To Paint a Staircase

As many of you know, we recently bought a house in the northern part of San Diego county.

It’s a beautiful house.

Gypsies we are, so I’m probably cursing myself by saying this, but we think this is our forever house. Or at least our 10 year house, but hopefully longer.

What you might not know about my husband and I is that we flipped houses in Arizona for a few years. We spent five years in Austin hating just about everything about the inside of our house – and didn’t really have the money, the motivation, or the bright ideas on how we could fix everything we hated.

That was hard for us, because, well, we really like re-doing houses.

So we decided that, while we loved this San Diego house as it was, we would do it up the way we want to. Maybe we’ll love it so much that we shed ourselves of gypsy.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been lining up a major renovation of nearly the entire downstairs of the house…and then some…and I’ll be blogging my way through the process – our big fat renovation, if you will!

Today, I am really excited to talk about how we transformed the staircase in the house. The previous owners put in a gorgeous, and what had to be extremely expensive upgraded, staircase with wrought iron balusters.

They also added a full-oak “library” area on the second floor that has tons of bookshelves and two large desk areas with under-cabinet storage.

We didn’t really plan on doing anything with the staircase, or the library, when we purchased the house. But when we elected to put dark brown hardwood floors on the first level, it became evident that we’d have a real clash of woods with an oak staircase and dark maple floors.

{Before we even got started, we had scope creep!}

We knew this: we could NOT afford to replace the wooden parts of the oak staircase, nor did we have the time. We both love the idea of a crisp white stairboard with a dark handrail, along the lines of this:

We happened to come across some amazing painters who work for homebuilders, and contracted them to do the job. They were priced so reasonably that we decided to have them paint the entire library area white as well. We couldn’t replicate the picture exactly due to the iron balustrades, but wanted to achieve the same general look.

They spent most of Memorial Day weekend sanding the entire staircase and library, putting on two coats of primer, then two coats of paint. We used a white Behr paint for the staircase and Frazee’s Bon Nuit brown for the handrail in semigloss.

Both the staircase and the library look better than I ever could’ve imagined. Here are the preliminary shots of how it turned out.

The staircase, viewed from the dining room:

From hallway, looking into library:

From desk area of library, looking at bookshelf:

I plan to put some brushed nickel knobs of some sort on the white cabinet doors, to break up the large swath of white. And of course, once all of our books are placed on the bookshelves, it will really break up the monochrome look.

While I was prepping this post, we had a plumbing leak that should prove to be a costly time delay on our project. We’ll see how things progress.

Tagged as: design, renovation