Renovate staircase: cheapest/easiest option

[MoreThanRubies]

What’s the most cost-effective way to renovate a stair case when we can’t do the work ourselves?

30s home, banister has many coats of chipped, yellowed gloss. Standard wooden handrail and uprights. I suspect the correct thing is to remove the old paint, sand and repaint. There’s no way we can find time to do that ourselves but it feels like such a lot of work that it must be expensive to pay someone to do it.

I don’t really mind whether it gets painted, varnished in the original wood, or even replaced. It just looks tatty as it is. What’s likely to be the most cost effective way to do it and how much is it likely to cost?

I suppose the very cheapest and quick thing to do would be to box them in - just cover them with some sort of boarding and paint or wallpaper.

You can buy something called clingstrip which is a paste that you put onto the wood, cover with cling film and leave for a few days. Then you peel it off and all the paint comes off. You need to poke any nooks and crannies but it is pretty easy and not a huge amount of work. You could do this and then ask a painter and decorator to give you a quote for prepping and painting.
Alternatively you could just get a painter and decorator to come and do the whole lot but they will sand and fill rather than removing all the paint.

You have the summer holidays coming up. Know any teenagers would like a project for pocket money?

Well fill in the damage sand it down minimally so it is smooth and then add another layer of paint over the top. That is the quickest and easiest way to do it, and tbh it won't look that much different if you removed all the old paint (unless there really is a lot of old paint on it so much it has changed its shape).

I would not get a gang of teenagers in to sand it down. Toxic dust, lead paint and all that.

You don’t need to take off all the old paint. Even a decorator won’t do that, they just lightly sand the surface to provide adhesion for the next layer of paint. Paint them a dark colour like navy, charcoal or dark green and they will look transformed.