How To Clad A Staircase?

Fitting wooden flooring on stairs has been extremely popular for several years now, and has been considered a very stylish option. Ever more people are picking wooden flooring for living rooms and dining rooms, and they also tend to extend this trend to their stairs.

Cladding in new houses

In the case of new houses, where you decorate your home from square one, you can go for a solid or an engineered wooden staircase right at the design and planning stage. However, if you’re going to do a renovation project, you will need to clad the current staircase – this is your only option, if you want your staircase covered with solid or engineered wood.

Cladding is the process which consists in covering an existing structure with a new material, thus creating a totally new look without the need to change the original form. In construction, this term is used to denote the process of applying one material over another. In the case of flooring, it consists in the application of engineered wood flooring to an existing or original staircase, which can totally transform it, giving it a new, stylish look.

Engineering vs solid cladding

If cladding your staircase with engineered wood flooring is your choice, the final result will be no different than if you select solid wood flooring, except for one thing. As you can’t manipulate engineered wood flooring in the same way as solid wood to make a stair nosing of individual steps, it will be necessary to install engineered wood nosing on each step.

Stair nosing is at first installed at the front of every step, which will create a neat join between the tread and the riser. In this way you will achieve a very stable and nice-looking finish. Before fitting new engineered wood floor nosing, you will need to remove the existing nosing on the original staircase. In this way, you will make it possible for the engineered wood nosing to be installed neatly, ensuring high stability.

Gluing engineered cladding

Last, but not least, you will need to bear in mind one crucial thing – if you’ve chosen to use engineered wood to clad the staircase, then you will need to glue the boards down to the original staircase. Even though, there is a multitude of engineered wood floor fitting methods that would work well in other interiors (such as floating, nailing and stapling), in the case of a staircase the floor needs to be glued down to the existing stairs. This will guarantee the required stability. Only in this way can you ensure that the new stairs will last long, look good and be safe.