Awesome Painted Basement Stairs

Our basement and basement stairs had been newly carpeted when we moved in. But when the basement flooded we had to tear out the carpet.  Mind you, the carpet on the stairs was perfectly fine, but it didn’t match the wood-look vinyl I installed in the basement and I thought it was weird to just leave carpet on the stairs.  So out it came and this is what I was left with.  View from top of stairs.  Ugly!

That’s my 3-year-old with his protective eye wear and toolbox 🙂I searched Pinterest, I Googled “painted stairs,” but I never found anything that knocked my socks off.  My daughter wants to write words on the risers.  We’ll see.  For now I am only committing to do a rainbow-ish look.  I found unopened green and blue exterior paint cans in the garage, and I figured basement stairs could use the extra durability, so I started there.  I bought a can of pink and called it a day.

How to get my look:

3) Paint one color at a time.  I painted all the pink steps first.  I taped off the sides, but regretted it.  I stopped using tape after that (except for the platform stripes).  I did 3 coats with a brush.

4) When the first color is dry, move on to the next.  I did blue next, followed by green.  The top riser still needs to be painted green in this picture.5) Now it was time to decide what to do with the landing.  I decided against painting the whole thing green, so I tried out a piece of vinyl flooring to see if I liked that.  Nope!!  My dad goes, why don’t you do stripes.  Hmmm… but which direction?  In line with the top stairs or the bottom stairs?  Either way I didn’t like it.  Here’s how it looked with vinyl.  Ugly, right?

I decided to paint the stripes to “curve”.  First I had to tape off my plan.  My landing is not square, so to make it square I painted one faux green stair.  You see what looks like a green stair in this pic?  Nope, that’s actually just paint on the landing.I honestly didn’t give the whole process much thought, just started taping, so please don’t think this is hard to do.  There are certain things you have to take into consideration when using tape.  If I just put the tape down and painted all my stripes, I would be left with gray stripes the width of the tape between each color.  This was not the look I was going for.  You also can’t paint two stripes next to each other at the same time because there’s no where to put the tape in between.  The  only solution is to tape twice.  This was the part that was a pain in the butt because I waited 3 days between paint stages, so I could safely put tape on the paint with less worry of it pulling up.

The first piece I put down was the one in the middle, starting at the upper left corner in the picture.  Then I worked out toward both sides.  Remember I had to paint in two stages.  Stage 1 gets painted first (of course!) and the tape is on the outside of the stripe (because you are painting inside).   The stripes that seem narrower will be saved for stage 2, I marked them with a small piece of tape to remind myself NOT to paint there.  They only look narrower now because the tape is INSIDE the painted area. This tape will be removed before I paint stage 2 and I will have to re-tape before painting.

Tip: Because you are constantly going back and forth with 3 colors, you need 3 paint brushes.  You are painting these stairs over several days (due to drying time) and will repeatedly need the brushes.  So when you are finished painting for the moment, just put the brush in a sandwich bag and stick it in the refrigerator.  It’s good to go the next time you need it.

7) Remove the tape and let the paint dry for at least 3 days.  (That random bit of blue near the corner was just me trying to see if I could freehand the stripes.  Nope.)

8) Tape over what you painted in stage 1 to mark the outside edge of stage 2.  I switched to Frogtape because my blue painters tape was not giving me very good results.   You can only do non-overlapping sections together.  I started by taping off the outside stripes.

9) Then I painted 3 coats of pink.

10) Remove tape and let dry. (Sorry no more pics of each of these steps.)  Tape off one of the remaining areas.  Paint, remove tape, let dry.  Repeat on the last remaining area and touch up where needed.11) Optional: Cover with water-based floor polyurethane

Finally finished!!