KC and I have been working on some projects around the house recently, trying to finish up our basement space and make it a bit more livable.  Honestly, we had just planned on painting the spare room and installing some plank flooring, but that turned into painting the basement stairs and hallway and a plan to paint the ceiling as well (we haven’t tackled that project quite yet).

I’ll start with the basement stairs, because I don’t have great pictures of the spare room yet to show you.

Here’s how the stairs started:

Hideous, super worn and covered with weird rubber mats.  And please notice the wall color — ugly avocado green.

Not pretty.

I painted the walls first — Glidden Silver Birch — then started in on the stairs.  Step one: remove the rubber mats.

Spackled the nail holes, then did a once-over with the electric sander and cleaned the stairs to ready them for paint.

One solid coat of Glidden Gripper primer.

Two coats of porch and floor paint in Valspar’s Gulf Coast.

I painted the bannister hardware gold (obviously), and painted the bannister with primer and some of my leftover white paint from this project (Behr Oyster Shell).

And voila, the finished stairs and hallway:

How to Paint Stairs (or a floor)

What you’ll need:

• spackling paste
• sander + medium-grit sandpaper (I used 100)
• broom, dust pan, clean rags
• painters tape
• paint brushes and rollers
• Glidden Gripper Primer
• Enamel Porch and Floor Paint (there’s also oil-based porch and floor paint, but oil paint tends to be harder to work with and smells awful, so I opted to use the enamel-based porch and floor paint) — I got my paint at Ace Hardware where they do custom colors for porch and floor paint, but only with a satin finish, so that’s what I used.

How to do it:

1. Fill in any holes with spackling paste and let dry.
2. Sand all surfaces, then clean with a broom and clean rags to remove any debris.
3. Prep the space with painters tape.
4. Paint one solid coat of primer and let dry for at least one hour.
5. Paint as many coats of paint as needed to get the finish you want (I did two coats + a touch-up).  Wear socks on stairs between coats, only after the paint has dried.
6. Let stairs cure for at least 72 hours before subjecting them to normal use.