With a little (ok, a lot) of elbow grease, you can update and refresh your staircase. What I did was lightly sand and wash with soap and water entire surface. I mean spindles, risers, handrail, side-rails, steps.
Then I applied a coat of high adhesion primer (I used Fresh start by Benjamin Moore) over all surfaces with a paint brush.
When that was dry I painted the spindles in a BM White, OC 117 simply white semi-gloss for the spindles, risers, and sides, basically everything vertical and I did 4 coats. Yes, 4 coats, 1 per day. It is a lot of work but only the first coat takes the longest, the rest goes pretty quick.
Next is the hard part, the steps, I am pretty good at cutting so I did not use tape, I found that a 1 inch brush did a good job if you have a steady hand if not use tape but you will have to wait for the white paint to dry very thoroughly at least 1 week or more before you put tape on it. Or what I did was do my best and then I applied a 1/2 inch cove trim to the joints in the same white pre-painted to give an extra clean line and more detailed look. I used a satin finish BM and the colour was Space black 2119-10.
(note: I did every other step so we could access going up and down)
Finally the hand rail in the black, everything horizontal in black.
With all the steps and drying time, it took about 3 weeks from start to finish. I only used 3 quarts of paint, 1 white 1 black and the primer. I have left overs of all three. Total cost was approx 80.00 including brushes. I had a quote from a painter to do this job because of the steps and labor it would have cost me 1200-1400 dollars.
