DIY Stairs Makeover for Under $200 with Full Cost Breakdown!!

hey guys my name is Bart Kumar and right now we are under quarantine Cogan 19 has put a huge strain on our country and all of our finances so renovating stairs is probably not on everybody's top 10 to-do list but if this is something that you want to tackle I'm gonna show you guys a fairly inexpensive way to get these stairs looking like this and all for under 200 bucks and along the way I'm gonna break out the entire cost of this project for you guys so you can determine whether or not it's worth it so let me show you guys exactly what I did here and get this thing going welcome to the colmar project all right guys so these are our stairs going down into the basement and obviously they've never been finished but today's a day first let's talk about what parts tears are made of because I'm gonna be referring to them quite a bit the sides of the stairs are called stringers the part you actually step on is called the tread and the rising part from the tread well let's call the riser so I start off by eliminating the connection between the drywall and stairs by adding a 1-inch piece of trim to the top of the stringer then I spackled everything to include the nail holes and wood knots on the stringers only I'm not worried about any imperfections on the treads or risers at this point because everything's gonna be covered soon after the spackle had a chance to dry and for got out of my way I started sanding everything smooth using my orbital sander with 120 grit unfortunately this part here is pretty important to get everything nice and smooth because this is the only part of the stairs that's gonna get painted from the original construction and any imperfections is going to show through the paint so I took my time here and I also removed all the glue from their original construction okay so the magic trick in creating these stairs for under 200 bucks is using solid oak strips for the bullnose and quarter inch oak plywood for the treads and to do this I need to cut off 3/4 of an inch from their original stairs where I'm going to be adding the oak strips it will all make sense shortly after marking three-quarters of an inch in on the stairs I use my circular saw and freehand cut as far as this saw would go then using the jigsaw which is by far my favorite tool and a little persuasion from the hand side cut off the three quarters of an inch I use the combination of three because at the time it just made sense for me but you really just need the circular saw and the hand saw and fortunately you don't need the jigsaw so got everything spackled it up next we're gonna sing it down a little bit just to make sure everything is like smooth on these stringers so that when we put the paint down there's no issues right next we're actually gonna primer them to make light down the road a little bit easier because we don't primer them this wood is just gonna soak up paint so let's put on the primer first so we don't have to worry about it later and now it's all open and it's easy so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel that's how it goes while the primer dried I went shopping in my ninja mask and picked up some folk quarter-inch plywood a sheet of brown cardboard which I'm going to be using for the risers and they actually ripped it down into smaller pieces for me at the store and some oak hardwood which you can get in thin strips or wider pieces whichever you prefer back in my driveway I used my friends table saw to rip the oak plywood into sections that are gonna make up the treads for all the steps then using the original cut off from the front of the stairs as a measuring guide I cut all of them down to size and the miters next I could install the plywood treads to the stairs using some liquid nails and a brad nailer later I ended up switching to a pin nailer and that basically eliminated all the nail holes [Music] [Music] I repeated the process for all the steps making sure that the plywood lined up with the front of the step well later I found that the steps that I extended the plywood out passed the step by about a sixteenth gave me a tighter fit and virtually no gap when I installed it from solid oak piece doing Bubba he's just checking out ready to work out ready to lift you pump somewhere yeah neither am i so uh uh we doing it while the glue dry down the steps I went back outside and started a trip down the oak for the bull nose and this is where I made a mistake I ripped them down to an inch and a half which is the thickness of my original stairs but I forgot to take into consideration the quarter inch of plywood I just added to the stairs so now I'm going to have a quarter inch of stairs showing under the bull nose to me it's no big deal I'll just paint it to match the riser and tell people it's a intentional architectural feature but if you guys are going to be doing something like this just keep in mind that you are making the stairs thicker so it's up to you whether you make the same mistake as me or do it a different way hope that makes sense next I pulled out my palm router and using a 3/4 inch roundover bit I routed both sides of the oak to create the bull nose effect that I've been telling you guys about then I sanded any imperfections from the round over with 120 grit sandpaper and it was time to glue them into place I made sure to apply plenty of glue flushed it with the step as much as I possibly could and nailed it in with a pin nailer it's okay if they're not perfectly flush just as long as the oak bullnose is higher than the plywood so I can sand it later on I don't want to have to sand the plywood to make everything even and risk sanding through the veneer so if the oak is a little bit higher you can see in that down it's the other way around I might have a problem but luckily everything turned out great and I was ready for saying this thing we chose is called early American I believe and it just came out too Brown and didn't match our existing flooring so I tried putting on another coat of beige to bring out some of the gray tones after the first coat it looked okay but I decided to put on another coat and I just kept messing around until I got the perfect color and after about three goats it looked just right typically on stairs I would apply the traditional three coats of polyurethane but since the time was of the issue for me with finishing these stairs I decided to try one coat poly from Minwax using a natural bristle brush I applied it to the top and to the front of the treads and then I just ran the brush very gently over everything to smooth out the finish and to be honest with you guys I couldn't tell the difference between three coats of poly and this one coat poly but I guess time will tell so if you guys are curious about how these floors are holding up go ahead and follow me on instagram very active there and I post stories all the time and I'm sure I'll be doing updates on these stairs as the week's go by next I started working on the risers by ripping the hardboard down to wit and then honey-bunny jumped in to help me and crosscut all of them to like I'm sure that's right yes [Music] this can also be done with a circular saw however I found that the edges are not as sharp as you would get from a table saw so a little hand sanding with some 120 grit will take care of that then some honey-bunny primer action with the same sensor primer and we're ready for the installation of them [Music] the installation is pretty much the same as the treads you apply a little bit of glue and use a pin nailer or a brad nailer to nail in place give it some time to dry and it's time for caulk the cop that I always use for paint projects is Alex fast drive-by damage to the acrylic caulk you can paint over it and it goes on super smooth and comes out of the tube really fast which means that I can start painting but I really don't like painting so and with that last stuff it's time to see what these stairs actually look like [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there you go guys the stairs are done and if you ask me they came out pretty darn good for just under two hundred bucks now I have thirteen steps and if you do the math and break it out it's just over 13 bucks per step which if you ask me is a lot better than the forty to fifty dollar range that you would have to spend on traditional oak treads so if you guys enjoyed this video or got something useful out of this project go hit that subscribe button along with the bail notification that way you don't miss any upcoming DIY bills that we have and let me tell you we have quite a bit of them so thank you so much for joining me on this experience stay safe out there and I'll see you guys next time hey you watch your mother but the glorious story ya know he's so glorious he smells like cutting smoke 24/7 now a chocolate are you looking at me like that hmm-hmm I didn't do it oh wow wow dude it's like that okay

Channel: Komar Project

Views: 1,011,027

Rating: 4.9048872 out of 5

Keywords: DIY, stairs, stair makeover, stair makeover diy, stair makeover easy remodel diy, stair makeover ideas, stair makeover kits, stair makeover cost, stair makeover uk, wood stairs, do it yourself, staircase makeover, diy stairs, home improvement, diy stair makeover, before and after, stair diy, staircase remodel, stair remodel, diy staircase renovation, how to make over stairs, how to finish stairs to basement, finish stairs, carpet stair makeover, staircase renovation

Id: AI1poE8dn10

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020