Wooden stairs?

[Peakedin1997]

Please help me to decide what to do about the stairs in my flat.

They are wooden (painted) and quite steep. They lead up to a first floor flat so they get very muddy and dirty from outdoor shoes / scooters.

Currently we have adhesive strips, but they have come unstuck and are quite dangerous.

I may just remove the strips and paint the stairs, but would that make them too slippery, especially when children are wearing wet shoes? Dc2 fell down the stairs recently, he was luckily unhurt but I'm worried about having uncovered wood for that reason.

Or we could get carpet but it would get very dirty and would look odd because we don't have carpet in the rest of the flat.

Are there any other options that I haven't thought of?

Thanks.

Ours are just stained, not painted. They're not slippy.

Thanks that's good to know. Did you use a special type of stain?

My stairs are painted with Little Greene floorboard paint and they were quite slippery.

I’ve since repainted them a different colour using F&B floor paint and noticed that it’s not slippery at all.

You can buy an anti slip floor finish type varnish thing which you just paint on. It won’t last forever - maybe a year or so, but is an unintrusive way of making the stairs are safer.

We had painted stairs in our last house and they weren’t slippery. Any time I’ve ever slipped on a stairs it’s been a carpeted stairs.

I've got carpet on my stairs and nowhere else and it looks completely fine. It's a runner so there is wood on each side and the bottom step is just wood too as that's the 'done thing' apparently.

Thanks for all of the replies. Not keen on carpet because we tend to wear outdoor shoes on the stairs and they get very dirty. I think I'm going to paint them.

If they’re steep then go with non-slip floor paint. Carpet will make them more dangerous as, in my experience, it takes precious room away from each step making steep stairs an even bigger nightmare.

Is there room for a stairlift? It doesn’t look cool but a friend of mine put a second hand one on her really steep stairs to help the kids while they were young.

Thanks @GrumpyHoonMain. No room for a stairlift, my kids would love it though!

We have wooden stairs to an external door that used to get very slippery when wet. So we added strips of special non-slip material, after seeing something very similar installed at local primary school entrance. There are many different brands available, for example:

www.fibregrid.com/anti-slip-flooring-decking/anti-slip-decking/anti-slip-grp-decking-strips/