Staining Stairs: Fails and Lessons Learned

In today’s post, I want to share a fail and lesson about staining stair railings. When we were renovating our townhome we updated the flooring with laminate flooring. We also decided to do the laminate flooring on the stairs. So part of this was staining the wood stair nosings a similar color as the flooring. We took a sample of the flooring to Benjamin Moore and they were easily able to find a stain that matched the gray of our flooring choice. 

Then the hard part. This was my first time staining wood and here are the lessons I learned: 

• Go with the grain of the wood; going the opposite way causes weird patterns from the absorption of the stain 

• Use a small amount of stain on a rag and go in circular motions with the grain of the wood; I found this helped me keep coverage even 

  
  

  

  Applying stain with a rag in the direction of the woodgrain

  
  
  
  

  

  Our townhome after the laminate was placed on stairs prior to living room completion

  
  

After I stained all 24 nosings we had them installed. We thought all was well, but after a month or so of walking up and down the stairs I noticed fading in certain spots. I talked to my Dad about this and the first thing he asked was if I varnished the nosings….no I did not! So, I had to go back an re-stain the faded areas, which didn’t blend as well as I liked, and then I had to varnish each nosing to prevent the stain from rubbing off. It was much harder to varnish the nosings after they were installed, so if I had asked some more questions and done some more research it would have prevented a serious headache. Lesson learned- varnish stair nosings!

Takeaways for you:

• use a small amount of stain on a rag on go in the direction of the wood grain

• varnish stair nosings once stain has completely dried, do this prior to install

• laminate flooring is very tricky to install on stairs, consider having them professionally instaled to save a lot of headache

• If you have young kids or are planning to have kids consider carpet on stairs. Our hard laminate flooring was always a slipping risk, it was also squeaky despite our professional install