Slippery stairs.

[hellymelly]

We have a pretty steep staircase down to our kitchen. It ends in a wall so would be really dangerous to fall down. At the moment it is carpeted, which I hate, and which looks really odd as the floors it meets at either end don't have carpet. I want to rip the carpet off but I'm worried that wooden stairs will be more slippery. Anything I can do to make the stairs safer?

Varnished stairs are a death trap - think very carefully about taking up the carpet!! However if you do, Gradus are the sort of company that do nosings with anti slip finish - although they can be rather industrial/commercial looking.

I wouldn't varnish them, I would just leave the wood bare. My friend says she thinks carpet is more slippery than bare wood, but the carpet seems reasonably grippy at the moment. I wondered if there was a coating that I could apply that would render them extra grippy?

How about a stair runner? I think they look really nice and it wont matter there is no carpet at the bottom.

Thought of stair runner, but tricky as the stairs curve in a funny way at the bottom, and also horribly expensive ! The ones I like are the flat wool ones too, and they would be quite slippery I think. I am thinking of sanding the wood roughly maybe?

My stair runner was £50 a carpet runner shop on eBay.. We cut the existing underlay to size and dp fitted it. It's flat wool mix, hard wearing an non slippy

we have individual stair carpets up our stairs atm, but for the most part they have been just naked wood...dh has fallen down them twice since the carpet went down.

my mother is paranoid about wooden stairs, but apart from dd pouncing on ds2 from the bathroom and tipping him backwards from the top to the bottom no one has come to harm on the stairs in the 12 years we have been here.

and i used to fall down stairs as a hobby all the time!

We have wooden stairs and soon after moving in I slipped down them twice (just the last two or three steps, but still painful). They go round a corner so I didn't think a runner would work, and we got sticky backed strips to put on them from a carpet shop, it has stuff like sandpaper on the upper surface. A couple of those on each stair and I haven't slipped down them since. (Mind you, I also go more carefully after slipping twice.)

oh- I like the idea of the sandy strips. I used to live on a boat and when you paint the decks (with gloss, so v. slippery) you mix in very fine sand and it makes it grippy, (or you can buy rubbery paint). As I want the stairs to be plain wood I couldn't do that, but sandy strips would do the job maybe? My DH's 95 year old Grandma went up and down a long flight of polished wooden stairs every day, I suppose one does learn to be careful. Or maybe I should paint them and add sand after all.

an uncarpeted staircase is very noisy.

You do live in a detached house, don't you?

Piglet is right. When we were renovating our old house we had a small time frame of no carpets on the stairs. Reading Piglets comment I do remember they made quite a clonk!

Hmm- no, a semi. But they have uncarpeted stairs at the same point next door and I rarely here them unless I am on my stairs at the same time. (Old houses, very thick walls). I can't remember if they have carpet on any of their other flights or not. But that is a good point as I hadn't thought of noise.

Doh! HEAR them.

You could always ask your neighbours and see how they find the stairs with no carpets (if that turns out to be the case) if your houses are similar in design?

their stairs are very different from ours at that point, and end in an open space (they have an extension downstairs, and the stairs are more modern, and open) So I don't think they would compare with ours for noise or slipperyness.