Stair upgrade from carpet to hardwood

[Certificate of Excellence]

I bought treads on a sale a few years ago with the intent to tear out the gross carpeted stairs (three sets in this home). With some paternity leave burning away, I finally had the time to tackle this job. I started with the bottom set of five which I think look nice, so I’m excited to get the stairmaster 5000 set done.

I am still missing the final kick plate on this bottom set but will put that in today & for the sides I’m thinking a beige/tan caulking (matches the wood) to cleanly fill any gaps along the sides & I’ll finish the bottom step with some quarter round along the base. Now it’s into the main set of stairs:

This demo was a nasty job I have to tell you. The carpet tack board they went overboard with doubling up on it so to remove it (sledgeomatic & crowbar)
was a pita and I stuck myself in the hand/fingers like 30 times through this demo. I also noticed that with this house being from 1977 (I think?) there have been multiple refreshes with new carpet as I had the joy of pulling out 5 zillion carpet pad staples from the subfloor before I could clean off the old glue and prep it for the new riser/tread. Lastly it is crazy how much dirt carpet lets through in an high traffic space and captures underneath - pretty gross.

SO, wife is taking me out to breakfast but after that I’m going to get back into cutting & installing the treads and risers with Liquid nails (no squeaks and no nail holes lol). I have a nail gun rig and is what I was going to use but my contractor father-in-law recommended liquid nails for a solid, no squeak, lasting bond.

This house is not square lol. Nothing about this house is square lol.

TBC

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I bought treads on a sale a few years ago with the intent to tear out the gross carpeted stairs (three sets in this home). With some paternity leave burning away, I finally had the time to tackle this job. I started with the bottom set of five which I think look nice, so I’m excited to get the stairmaster 5000 set done.
View attachment 14199
I am still missing the final kick plate on this bottom set but will put that in today & for the sides I’m thinking a beige/tan caulking (matches the wood) to cleanly fill any gaps along the sides & I’ll finish the bottom step with some quarter round along the base. Now it’s into the main set of stairs:
View attachment 14200
View attachment 14202
This demo was a nasty job I have to tell you. The carpet tack board they went overboard with doubling up on it so to remove it (sledgeomatic & crowbar)
was a pita and I stuck myself in the hand/fingers like 30 times through this demo. I also noticed that with this house being from 1977 (I think?) there have been multiple refreshes with new carpet as I had the joy of pulling out 5 zillion carpet pad staples from the subfloor before I could clean off the old glue and prep it for the new riser/tread. Lastly it is crazy how much dirt carpet lets through in an high traffic space and captures underneath - pretty gross.

SO, wife is taking me out to breakfast but after that I’m going to get back into cutting & installing the treads and risers with Liquid nails (no squeaks and no nail holes lol). I have a nail gun rig and is what I was going to use but my contractor father-in-law recommended liquid nails for a solid, no squeak, lasting bond.

This house is not square lol. Nothing about this house is square lol.

TBC

So after getting rained on, snowed on, and experiencing a liquid nail explosion which killed my favorite caulking gun, I got the treads in.

Odd that this set of stairs riser is about .25 inches shorter than the one I did yesterday but attribute it to settling over the decades. This created some additional cuts end to end on a few of these risers so they did not prevent the tread above it from properly adhering to the subfloor. Also there is a 1/2 inch gap at the base of each riser which proved to be a big PITA I did not plan for. Because of this gap for example there’s nothing to support the white riser so it sags/drops due to gravity if only construction adhesive is used so leaving a visible gap under the tread. I ended up using my pneumatic nail gun to secure those.

I’ll have to go back and fill/paint which is extra steps/work I wasn’t planning on but I couldn’t Sus out how to do it any other way & I wanted this portion of the job done today.

I’ll let the adhesives cure for a few days and will then go in on the finish work &

As it turns out the walls on either side originally had fugly avocado tiles on either side. This left some big gaps when the previous owner had that demoed and the stairs recarpeted & will be interesting to work around. We’ll see how that goes.

Turns out stair remodels are not my favorite demo/remodel job lol.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Ok so I got the horizontal finish caulking done. Definitely pulls it together a bit. I am thinking about puting 7” baseboards (same hickory) along the sides which I think will look nice and add to the wearability vs the Sheetrock or something like quarter round. Anyhow, coming along.

Who knew that baby wipes are the absolute best at cleaning up caulked lines. Can’t recommend enough

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I finally got the majority of finish work done.

I could not find finished hickory quarter round in my area so I settled on this composite stuff that matched reasonably well. I have only secured with the *tiniest* amount of calling on each end with the hopes that so run into some actual finished hickory quarter round. I’ll buy about 5 er 6 lengths pull these out and put the real stuff in and secure for real with liquid nails.

I am happy with how it turned out. Between life & work and all the junk that we catch downstream, I’m happy with how it looks. Definitely a nice upgrade to our home.

 

[Yoda]

That's a great job, and it looks ace!

I had my stairs replaced with hardwood 20 years ago - by a contractor who unlike me knew what he was doing - and I could see how tough the job was. Even slightly out-of-square creates astonishing complications.

It was well worth it though - it still looks good.

That's a job well done!!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Well, it has paid off already as I spilled/dripped coffee going downstairs to my office to get my day started LOL. Easy clean up now

I still am so impressed with baby wipes. I have another project that is going on that requires caulking to fill gaps from my noodle-y, non-square walls and those baby wipes are wet and clean up edges and seams so nicely when pressed around the natural concave feature of ones finger. I can not over state how handy these things were for caulking seams. I will forever have a few packs of baby wipes in my garage/home repair/upgrade/tinker kit.

When I die, my kids will be like "Dad was obsessed with baby wipes, we keep finding them everywhere" LOL

 

[Garrett]

I'm gearing up to do something similar. I plan to rip out the old treads/risers and install oak direct on the stringers themselves. So much harder with an infant! I can't make too much noise or dust like I used to...

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Man, I’m glad to see that there is no gap between the tread and the riser attached to the stringer on yours stairs. When I pulled the carpet off my stairs, I found 1/2 to 3/4 gap there lol - like seriously? You couldn’t have spent the extra penny to not have a gap? Lol My plan was to just liquid nail the riser up there but I couldn’t because they would slide down because of those stupid gaps lol so I had to nailgun them in place instead which then created more work. That and some of them were at a slight angle which I shimmed out to true 90’. Everything came out fine but holy crud it was a pain in the butt. I never would have imagined gaps lol and when I saw that I was like .. uhhhhh didn’t expect nor did I plan for this Being that I was on borrowed time to finish the job or at least get it to a point the family could walk up n down them, I was annoyed and cussing the builders with that development. I’ve never seen stairs built out like that before anyhow.

I have a 6.5, 4.5 & 6m/o . In order to do this job, my wife took them all about 4hrs north to visit grandma and grandpa for a long weekend. I recommend a similar move.

Good luck on your stairs!