Flooring for stairs

Yes to carpets on stairs obscuring where the step edge is, especially when there isn’t adequate lighting, so more risk for trips/falls. I also find carpeted steps to generally be more slippery than hard wood, with one caveat…no sock feet on hard wood steps ever. Bare feet or shoes only.

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We like leaving our maple hardwood stairs exposed. I haven’t found them slippery at all.

Ha, I just remembered that in our first house, I was trying to be a good housewife and wanted to clean the wood stairs, so I used furniture polish. Uh, not the brightest idea!!

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Our previous house had beautiful walnut stairs, uncovered.

I gave my youngest daughter the job of cleaning them one day and she used something a little too slippery or didn’t wipe off enough of the product from the stair.

My husband took a BIG tumble on that slippery step, had a bruised from back to butt to legs and my youngest still isn’t over feeling bad about it!! :laughing:

Funny but not funny.

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A long time ago we ripped out the stair carpet. Redid the wood on the stairs and fixed most of the creaks. Painted it jet black. Put in a metal hand rails to go up the stairs. We have granite in our entry way which is right next to the stairs. First floor is all wood. But have granite by the fireplace and out the back door to back yard to bring that element in. Upstairs is all carpet. But we have good conditioned hard wood under it.

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Also not familiar with teh terminology, but our berber was way to thick to tuck underneath the step above. So, yeah, depends on carpet style and thickness.\

fwiw: my son bought a narrow row house with lotsa wooden stairs. Not slippery if you remove socks and go bare foot, which is what we do when visiting.

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DJ Johnson probably lost a couple million dollars when he slipped on wooden stairs at his rental house at the Masters in 2017 (he had been playing really well in the run up to the tournament). He injured his back and wasn’t able to compete.

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We tore the carpet off our stairs and discovered half the treads were oak, and the others were pine! I stained the pine ones to match better since all that’s upstairs are bedrooms and I wasn’t gonna pay to have the pine ones replaced. I paint the facing every few years because it gets kicked, etc as we go up and down and the scuffs are obvious since the stairs face the entryway.

We didn’t do a runner because of the visual problems of seeing the edge, and honestly I find plush carpet stairs slippery too. We’ve never had a problem with the wood. They make carpet treads that just stick on, but I think they are too busy and I prefer a very clean look.

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The hardest thing about stairs is if you fall down them. I hate my friends stairs–you could easily miss a step or just slide and just land at the bottom and it’s a long way.

We have LVP and the edge cap has a slight “lip” on it. At first I didn’t like it but now I really do because you can feel the step. It’s kept us from having to carpet the stairs to have better footing.

Small tangent…we prefer the Hollywood style carpeting with the step past the riser part (pretty classic style). But - we have a staircase that is a bit dark on the last 4 steps down. We have a motion controlled light that illuminates that part of the staircase and turns on from motion 4-5 feet away. We happened to have an electrical outlet there so ours is a plug-in, but I think you could have a battery operated one. I feel the steps are quite a bit safer with this.

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The townhouse we are buying has LVP on the stairs with end caps on each stair. You can definitely feel each step. H thinks that is unusual but I think it’s a good thing. The seller installed the LVP throughout the house in the past 6 months and it matches throughout the home. I don’t find it slippery at all with bare feet. We in HI generally are barefoot around houses.

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Are you moving to a new place??

No we are buying an investment property. We love our current house and neighborhood. We especially love that our entire home is all ONE floor!

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A friend who is married to an architect said that he designed their current home and had commercial grade rubber glued to the stairs so it’s sturdy and functional. She really likes it. I haven’t seen their home but that’s an option that I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread.

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That commercial grade rubber makes it sound like a building stairwell :rofl:

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Well, the wife of the architect claims it’s awesome, so at least he and she love it.

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D and SIL also architects put similar stairs in the DADU (granny flat). It looks nice and not institutional. Pale green. Very durable and easy to clean.

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