How do I get my stairs looking good?

[JustKeepSlimming]

We moved house recently, and it looks like the previous owners have gone round with a big tub of white emulsion and just painted everything. This includes the stair railings. The paint is now starting to flake off, so I was planning to scrape it back a bit and then repaint it. However, now that we've got some of the paint off, we've realised that underneath is actually quite nice wood - we reckon it was a proper wooden staircase originally, but they just painted over it.

The question is, what do we do with it? If we can sand all the paint off, can we re-stain it and get it looking nice again? It looks like pine, which has been stained rather than varnished, although it's hard to tell at this stage.

Any advice?

it will just be really hard work. You would be best to test an inconspicuous patch first to check the stain will come off well.
I watched someone’s TikTok video of them doing their staircase last week. Amazing results. It was really dark brown stain/varnish. I just assumed it was dark wood but it was really light when they stripped it back. They stained it light and it looked like a different house.
Someone has stripped our staircase at some point as there are two different colours of paint chips in a couple of hard to get at places. Not a job I would like to do.

Thanks @BloodyInternetWeirdos. The paint is coming off fairly easily, so I'm reasonably optimistic that I'll be able to get most of it off with the sander. Would paint stripper work for the awkward parts? Or would that wreck the wood?

It looks like it's light in colour, but stained darker - doesn't look varnished. There are a couple of parts which I think have been added later which are still the light colour.

If I do get the paint off, would I then just stain whatever is underneath? Or would I need to do something to prep the surface?

Try a heat gun for anything left after sanding. Osmo does nice stains. You already have it sanded, so all the prep is done. Stain won't cover any paint remnants, though, so you have to remove everything.