Utility Stairs Revamp!

When I bought my house, I fell in LOVE with it immediately. Well all of it except this back stairwell. You see, this stairwell leads from the laundry room to the garage and had very light colored carpet and walls.  Talk about dirty! I couldn’t keep it clean, especially in the winter. So for a year and a half I was stuck with this terrible hallway because I had NO idea what to do with it. Then one day my son spilled a whole bottle of soda on the carpet and I SNAPPED. I got out the tools and ripped all the carpet out. UH OH! What had I just done? I wasn’t expecting the tack strips, staples and very damaged wood stairs that I found underneath that carpet. I had some serious thinking to do. No way was that carpet going back down so I proceeded to rip out the tack strips. Unfortunately, that damaged the wood stairs even more, not to mention the big chunks of concrete that pulled up on the bottom landing. At this point I was at a loss, I didn’t know what to do. So I lived with it like that for another 6 months. UGH! I shopped on occasion for indoor/outdoor carpet but was never able to find something I really liked. Then one day I decided to tackle the problem. I went to Home Depot and bought a gallon on Martha Stewart brand glossy exterior paint in a wonderful color called Francesca and some wood filler. That night my stepdaughter and I filled all the cracks and gouges in the wood steps. The next day we sanded the steps and put our first coat of paint on. At this point I realized that I was going to need something that was anti-slip for the steps. I researched everything from rubber mats to anti-skid additive for the paint. I eventually chose to go with the anti-skid additive because it was the most economical solution. So I divided up the remaining paint (so I would have some without the additive) and added the anti-skid to half the paint. I used Skid-Tex by Zinsser which I bought at Lowes for about $6. After putting on the last coat I realized that my steps were so dark now that it was hard to see where to step. Oops! So then I had to research safety treads for the ends of the stairs. I went with a light grey and used 3M Safety-Walk Slip Resistant Medium Resilient Tread 1 in x 60 ft Roll. I bought it on Amazon for about $25. I was pretty happy with the outcome of the stairs and decided that I needed to paint the walls too. I used another Martha Stewart color called Bay Leaf. I used a satin sheen for easy clean up. I LOVE the look of the back steps now and I especially love the green walls. I love color but don’t usually use such bold ones. This color makes me smile every time I come home!