the Great Stair Case Renovation of 2010 | Update 1
It’s been over 2 weeks since I began the careful demo of my stairs. To make a long story short, for those who haven’t read the previous blog, read it now. There now you’re all caught up. So to help other understand what I’ve been going through and why it takes such a long time, I’m going to outline everything I’ve been doing to each and every single stair tread.
First I begin by removing the stair tread from the stairs and place them outside my workbench. In this case, to speed up the process I work two at a time. I’ll explain later.
I’ve been use Klean-Strip’s Premium Sprayable Stripper. It comes with a plastic spray container. This can be found in any Home Depot or Lowe’s.
I spray the painted areas of the wood with the Stripper and I let it sit for 10-15 minutes. In the mean time I was I taking some bad-ass pictures which I’ll be posting later on my other website.
Soon you can see the paint start to curdle and lift itself off the wood.
I begin to scrape the paint off the wood with a metal scraper. I would normally use a plastic putty knife, but this paint is so old I needed something that will totally get as much of the paint off in one shot, so I scrape hard. I don’t mind damaging the surface of the wood, as my dad is going to over it with a belt sander once it’s all dried.
That being said… Power tool with wire brush attachment does wonders in removing what the scrape doesn’t pick up. Side story, after physically scraping 5 treads by hand and using a wire brush to remove the leftover paint, I head to home Home Depot to buy more Stripper when I cam across this attachment. It literally cut my time down in half. It’s all about the tools man. The tools.
When all the scraping is finished and the wood dust settles, what’s left should be a clear board. You may notice some red staining on the wood here, that’s my dad’s fault. He tested a stain he had for like forever on one of my treads. Hopefully it’ll come off when he belt-sands the whole thing.
My next step is wash off all the gunk that’s left over from the Stripper (ha, that sounds funny). Here I really blast all the gunk off with a water house set at jet and I really get in there soaking up the treads real good.
I place the treads back on the work bench and go over the surface with a wire brush. The idea is to pick off all the tiny paint speckles left over. Like before, I don’t mind scratching up the surface because we’re gonna belt-sand the entire surface. I question why I even do this step at all.
After the brushing I put the treads back under the water jet stream and let them dry off and soak up some sun, usually about an hour or two.
The final step, I use the Olympic Premium Deck Cleaner to treat the wood. I dump the liquid into a plastic spray pump and spray a liberal amount all of the treads. I let it sit for another 5-10 minutes before washing off the cleaner with a hose set to shower, and that is all she wrote.
I repeated this process 11 times. Total time took me about 10 hours in total, staggered over 3 days. By the way, remember that story I was telling about the wire brush? Below is picture of what’s left of it.
You can see the high resolution images here.
the Great Stair Case Renovation of 2010
So we decided to begin redoing the stairs at our condo and have come across many solutions. We could remodel the entire staircase but would cost into the thousands of dollars or we could reuse what we already have and have it come in under budget (of which we have none). We decided to go with the cheaper option.
I had help from dad, who’s been a carpenter for the better part of 60 years and asked for his expert advise. We began ripping off the carpet from the treads and removing the staples from the wood itself. We must have removed over 500 staples by hand using a pair pliers and a pointed chisel. It took the entire day to remove those damn staples from the 11 treads.
When all the staples were removed, when took the first tread and removed the paint on it with Stripper X and a chisel and razor spatula. After washing away the paint junk we were life with clean slab of pine. All the left for now is to do the same to the other 10 treads. Updates are to come soon.
