Home Improvement Mom and Wife

Project Review: Paper Bag Flooring on the Stairs

Dilemma: Stairs going to basement

They were a mess, beat up wood stairs with a 1' x 3' shredded and stained and fraying green and white berber carpeting attached with roofing nails.  I am trying to build the picture in your mind so you can visualize because again I am terrible at taking "before" pictures. I need to get better, especially if I am going to blog more ideas. It's hard to tell how good after looks unless you have seen the before.

I saw on a blog where they painted the treds in a semi transparent stain.  So I went out and bought some and decided that is what I was going to do.  My husband was less than thrilled about this idea.  That's when I came accross this idea.  Seemed simple enough for me to accomplish while hubby was at work.  I like projects I can get lots of it done while hubby is at work, I also like projects I can get the kids to help me with. I am not sure why it is called paper bag flooring only because you use brown crafting paper rolls. 

Supply list should you want to attempt this:

-Roll of brown crafting/painting paper (you can find this in the painting aisles at home depot or lowes)

-1 gallon of floor grade polyurethane, I got semi gloss (I bought quick dry I am impatient)

-brush or foam brush to put on polyurethane

-Glue- Elmer's glue or any other kind of glue- Michaels had decompage glue on sale so that is what I bought.  I bought 3 16 oz. containers and only ended up using 2 of them.

-Stain- if you would like the flooring to have a darker color, I think that it also worked in nicely to the wrinkles in the paper to bring them out more. I used a golden oak stain but the color turned out much darker than that.

-water

-bowls for mixing the glue/water mixture 3-1 ratio.

To get started you want to rip the pieces of paper into sections, smaller for stairs, larger for whole rooms or hallways.  Then crumple them up into balls.  I put them in mop buckets, edge pieces and middle pieces.  Then throw them into the glue mixture (not too long just to soak them), squeeze them out and uncrumple and aoply it on the surface you are covering.  Be sure to get out air bubbles and such.  Keep going, for the stairs I had to wrap them around the front piece.  I also did every other stair as we have a wood stove in the basement to heat our house and I needed to be able to use the stairs.  Let dry 3-4 hours and then stain.  After staining let dry the amount of time recommended on back of stain container and then put your first coat of polyurethane on.  I put 5 coats on my stairs due to heavy foot traffic, 2 kids and 2 dogs.  It took me awhile.  I would put one on before bed, wake up and put another one on.  Sand lightly between coats after you have a few coats on you can give it a good sanding down to get any wrinkles or bumps out. I did a medium sand I liked the textured look.

Here are some during the project phots.

Every other stair complete with stain and one coat poly

 After pics, hubby added some nice trim.  I like the way he wrapped it down around the bottom landing! He is so creative!

After with molding

We decided to complete the back of the stairs with a sheet of bead board paneling.  It took one sheet.  Hubby cut it with a table saw.   We like the clean cut look of the white against the darker wood look.

 We are happy with the way it turned out and so far it is holding up great with our family and pets and I have no complaints after several months of heavy use. Most people have no idea what it is we used and when we tell them they are impressed.  LOL I am very happy with the way this project turned out.