Painting our Stairs

Our stairs and our the hallway leading upstairs were kind of a hot mess before I got my hands...and paint on them!  Once I was done working my magic we ended up with this:

So to start from the beginning...

There were three things wrong with the stairs that led me to painting them:

1.  The previous owners attempted to stain the risers, which left them with drip lines and super blotchy!

2.  The risers were a different color then the treads, which both were a different color than the trim going upstairs and the railing.

3.  We didn't want to sand every tread and also didn't want to rip everything out. (Eventually once the hubs was on board)

We started with this:

The hubs was VERY opposed to painting the stairs initially because he thought it was going to take away from the house.  His initial plan was to sand the treads and re-stain them, but one night when he was at work I had enough of the nasty stairs and whipped out my paint and went to town.

I started out by using priming the risers with whatever I could find on hand, then followed by using Sherwin Williams Marshmallow.  I started the project later then I wanted so I didn't have time to finish painting the trim on the sides.  I was pretty nervous on how the hubs was going to react to my latest project since initially he was not a fan of my idea of painting the stairs.  To say the least it took him a bit to warm up to the idea, but now he realizes what a good idea it was to paint them and it saved us a lot of stress with making a small project bigger then it needs to be!  

I opted not to do anything with the tops of the stairs besides clean them with some Murphy's Oil.  They are dinged, scratched and worn but I think it brings out some of the character from the house!

Eventually once the hubs was alright with the idea of painting the stairs and saw what a difference a little paint makes I finished painting the trim going up stairs.  I was SO excited with the difference some paint made!  We still haven't done anything with the railing, but for now we are pretty content with how they turned out!!

So to quickly recap if you haven't seen enough pictures...

This is what we started with:

 And this is what we ended with: