Before choosing which wood flooring option might suit your stairs, it’s a good idea to double-check whether or not a wooden staircase is ideally suited to your entire household’s needs. While a well fitted and good quality wooden staircase can look stunning, if you have young children, pets or elderly or infirm members of your family, you may in fact be better off sticking with carpet. From a safety point of view, a wooden staircase, while looking great is no doubt a slippier option than carpeting; so do bear the safety of your whole household in mind before you make your final decision.
Once you’re confident that a wooden staircase is absolutely right for you and your family, you’ll need to decide whether a solid or an engineered wooden flooring product will suit you best. You can create some stunning wooden staircase effects with both solid and engineered flooring, but it’s important again to make the right choice for your room conditions. If you’re in any doubt about the difference between solid and engineered wooden flooring, you’ll get some helpful information here.
Once you’ve made the choice between engineered and solid wood flooring for your staircase, it’s important to think about the end result and how it will look. One thing to bear in mind is that if you choose engineered boards to fit over your existing staircase, a nosing will be required to match the floor. A nosing is effectively an edging, which goes over the protruding part of each step to give it a finished look. If your choice is solid wood for your staircase, the solid wood boards can be worked to produce an integral nosing saving you the need for pre-fabricated nosing (but this is not a job for the unskilled).