How To Install Wood Flooring On Stairs?

If you’re thinking about adding value to your home, you won’t have to make it larger – you will just need to work on it to make it better. Maybe you just need to change something and make your house look different, maybe you want to renovate a house you have just bought, or maybe you are planning to sell the house at a higher value… then our advice would be to focus on floors in your rooms and especially hallways and stairs, which catch the eye and can add quality and value to any property.

The majority of flats in the UK have staircases made of low-quality softwood or a softwood and MDF mixture, covered with carpets or rugs. It’s true to say that this is a cheaper option, but you must remember that carpeted softwood staircases will definitely reduce the value of your house or flat and won’t make any impression on your visitors or potential buyers.

Cost

The cost of installation of a solid oak staircase ranges between £10,000 and £25000, so it’s admittedly a pretty big and costly renovation project. But, if you can’t afford that you can go for quite a straightforward solution to remake your hallway and landing woes: simply install hardwood flooring and overclad the stairs using solid wood.

You may wonder how to do it. Simply contact ESB Flooring and we will do that for you. With our long-year experience and many successful renovation projects, we are a trusted partner, who will bring all your ideas into life – you won’t have to worry about anything, we will do it for you.

First, our ESB professional flooring consultants will pay you a visit, providing a free quote encompassing the entire renovation project. Once all the details including the laying style and the finish etc. are agreed on, our experts will start the implementation of the project. Should you need any inspirations or ideas, feel free to contact us, talk to our experts during the visit, or go to Pinterest, Houzz or Instagram.

Renovation stages

The first stage of the renovation project consists in ripping up the carpet along with the underlay from the hallway and the staircase. Once the oak floor has been installed, our professionals will take all the measurements of the stairs, which encompass careful and detailed measurements of the tread, the nosing and the rising of the stairs. By doing so, we will ensure a perfect end result.

Then, they will rip off the treads and take them away, so as to overclad them and put on new nosings. Most frequently, the new nosings of the stairs are made of the same oak flooring as that used in the hallway. All the works will be performed off-site, and then our experts will just need to clad the existing treads with new ones, and subsequently install the nosings, which will take them only several hours.

How long it takes?

The process of overcladding a standard staircase with new treads lasts four or five hours. At the end, there’s a need to quickly sand the stairs and top the flooring with a finish of your choice (our product range encompasses traditional water-based floor lacquer and various oils).

ESB Flooring only uses top-quality finishes, which dry really fast. The drying period is up to an hour per coat, in the case of all lacquers and oils used. This means that we can apply the finish (covering four coatings) in the maximum time of four hours.

It takes slightly longer for the lacquer to cure – it requires 48 hours. However, you can walk across the newly finished floor after only an hour from the moment the last coat has been applied, and it will not get damaged.

Perfect fit

The question you may ask yourself at this point is probably: How do we do it so that everything fits perfectly? In order to ensure a great fit and a perfect final result, we use different sized oak boards for every project. For instance, if the rise is 180mm high, we use 180mm wide boards, which are then cut to perfectly fit the length of the stair’s tread. In the case of 320mm wide treads, we use two 160mm boards that are glued together and then sanded to guarantee their uniform look. Subsequently, we would cut off the tongue of the board and add a new nosing, thus creating exactly the same look as before. Alternatively, we can use router to make a bullnose, which will help us ensure the colour is uniform, by avoiding colour variations. In this way we will get a solid and uniform construction which can just get overcladded in solid oak.

The best products

Moreover, we also focus on making it safe. At ESB Flooring, only top-quality floor lacquers from trusted manufacturers (e.g. Treatex, Osmo, and Bona Kami) are used. Various water-based lacquers are usually used as a finish for oak wood flooring– in this way we can guarantee the floor’s overall safety, without running any risks. Even if we use five coats of lacquer, the wood flooring will still retain the original anti-slip properties.

However, oil finishes are a totally different story. If you apply more than two reserved coats of oil, the floor can obviously become slippery. So, if you have kids and are worried they may slip on the stairs and don’t think standard lacquer can ensure enough protection, we’ve got a solution.

There are antifriction and anti-slip products available for sports flooring – they can be applied to your hardwood flooring, making it less slippery. If you use these products to coat the stairs and the landing, the floor surface will be a bit rougher to the touch. When it comes to the looks of the floor –it won’t differ from a floor on which a normal water-based lacquer was applied. Nevertheless, if you feel like using extra precautionary measures, but don’t want it to affect the surface of the flooring, there is a possibility of choosing a final coat with a friction floss or a sports lacquer, which has been designed to provide a firm grip and achieve an anti-slip effect.