Updating an Old Staircase
Sharing the design details of updating an old staircase from spiral to floating stairs in the new house.
I’m sure you can all think of a lot of phrases that start off with “nothing good comes from…”. In our case, nothing good comes from 1970’s spiral cases and toddlers. So we’ve totally nixed the original and are updating our old staircase in the new house.
In case you missed the announcement posts with all of the listing photos, you can check out the original stairs in all of their glory right here.
Below is a photo of the space after we closed on the house and the staging furniture was removed. Everything was just really closed in and dark.
Also, say hello to Genesis CP in there doing their thing for the first (of many) walkthroughs! You can see from the floorplan changes here that we ended up taking down the wall just past the stairs and opening up a lot of the kitchen.
Below is what it looked like after they removed the old spiral staircase. SO much more open, right?!
Now this is the new general layout of the floating stairs and how the treads look. There are so many creative stair riser ideas. And we wanted one that wouldn’t break the open flow of the first floor.
Note that all of the poles going from the floor to the base have been removed. So the stairs will appear truly floating. I also LOVE the look of the ash wood treads!
We’re now into the debate on railing solutions. The idea is that the stairs will be modern but not take away too from the view of the lake from the wall of windows.
Whatever we did for the stair railings needed to be similar in style to the upstairs overlook railing. The upstairs railing also needs to be replaced. It’s rickety and the railings are too far apart. And considering that that space will occupy our playroom and wet bar, safety was a huge concern.
Since both of the railings will meet in the upstairs balcony, the two styles really need to flow. This is the balcony from before…
And below are the new styles we’re going for that I designed as a quick mockup. The handrail will be stained to match the light wood flooring that we’re using throughout the rest of the house and the balusters themselves will be white.
For the balcony, I thought it would be a place we could have a little more retro fun with the design while still matching the general flow.
Luckily, Genesis CP hasn’t stopped returning my calls or texts yet. But the jury is still out! Let’s just say I’m a bit of a micromanager when it comes to the design details. Can you blame me though?! I literally break a sweat when I think about how much money we’ve put into this house!
- See how much we bought our house for here, plus some things we did right and wrong with buying a reno.
- You can see ALL of the first-floor floorplan changes right here.
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