How do I paint my stairs?

BrianJD

Hey.

I'm just wondering if it is possiblr, how and how hard would it be to change my standard boring pine stair banister and railings to something like this. What would i need to do to prep my current stairs. Is it gloss paint i'd need and hat should i use to darken the banister? Thanks in advance!

microgirl

Yep, it's easy, my mam did it. Ok, so it doesn't look exactly like that beause it's just pine, not mahogany, but otherwise you'd have to get a whole new bannister, and that's expensive.

Basically I think you'd just need to strip the handrail of what varnish it has and then you can buy woodstain in any hardware shop and stain it dark. You can also buy stain varnish aswell. The handrail in the pic looks more waxed+polished than varnished, but varnished is just easier to keep. Alternatively what my mam did with our already-white-painted handrail, rather than strip the old paint off, is do a faux wood-grain finish. You have a lighter undercoat and then you put a darker top coat of glaze over it and use a comb-toothed thing to creat a woodgrain-effect pattern. A DIY book would tell you how, or Google for faux wood grain effect finish or something.

Spindles you then paint in white gloss. You might need to strip old varnish off them first; I don't know if one can paint over varnish. I can't see why you couldn't, but I don't know much about DIY.