Add drama, color, and pattern to your home with these easy DIY staircase ideas.

Many people don’t think about the staircase when decorating their homes, but it’s actually a great place to add color and pattern. Whether you have a high traffic stairs or a lesser used staircase, there are plenty of DIY staircase ideas to give your steps some flair and personality. Instead of boring old steps, your stairs could be a dramatic high point of your decor with these easy staircase ideas.

Clever DIY Staircase Ideas

1. Chalkboard Paint – Chalkboard paint is amazing stuff. Simply paint it on the front of your stair risers and let the kids decorate your stair fronts with colored chalk. Make it clear that this is the one place that it’s okay for the kids to color on the walls, though!
2. Pattern Mixing Wallpaper – Wallpaper is another great DIY stair makeover tool. Don’t just use the same design on each riser though, but mix it up instead. Mix and match stripes and florals or stripes and dots for two powerful combinations.
3. Piano Keys – Turn your staircase risers into a piano by painting them fronts white and adding black accents. Make sure to reference a real piano to get the pattern correct!
4. Painted White – All white painted stairs, while a challenge to keep clean, are a thing of beauty. Maybe don’t do this if you have kids and pets.
5. Stenciled Patterns – Among the DIY staircase ideas, one of the simplest ideas is to use a stencil to create a pattern on the stair fronts. You can find stencils at home improvement and craft stores.
6. Letters and Sayings – Use stick on letters to add inspirational sayings, song lyrics, poetry, or other meaningful words to your stair risers.
7. Colorful Freehand Stripes – Turn all that leftover paint into a colorful boho project by painting horizontal or vertical freehand stripes of varying widths on your stair risers.
8. Rulers and Yardsticks – Repurpose rulers, yardsticks, and other fun stuff by gluing them to stair risers.
9. Steps of Many Colors – Don’t settle for one color, but instead choose a different color for each riser. Many home improvement stores carry small containers of specialty and signature paints.
10. Decorative Tiles – Add tiles to stair risers for pattern and color. Use the same tile pattern for the whole staircase, or use a different pattern for each riser.
11. Mosaics – If you want to make a real project out of decorating the stairs, create an artistic mosaic using glass, tile, stones, ceramic pieces, and other bits and bobs. This way would obviously take quite some time to complete, but it would be totally unique!
12. Wainscoting – Sometimes simple is best and adding wainscoting to stair risers is a great way to add some lovely texture.
13. Black Paint and Gold Stencil – For some drama, consider painting your stair fronts with black paint and stenciling an intricate design or pattern in gold paint.

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14 Metaphorical Staircases to Ponder On

Image: TributeDesigns

The post 13 Brilliant Staircase Ideas to Give Your Stairs a Step Up appeared first on EcoSalon.

Metaphoric and literal, these staircases make us stop and ponder.

In life, we spend a lot of time mounting and alighting from steps – both figuratively and literally. We go up. We go down. On occasion, our lives spiral in every which way, but always there’s another step on the horizon. We take it.

Considering staircases as a purely utilitarian feature to get us from one level to another, and as a metaphorical reference to the ups and downs of a life lived either passively or intentionally, we found 12 staircases that make us stop and ponder; laugh and wonder.

“An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an ‘Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign,’ just ‘Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’”

– Comedian Mitch Hedberg

“God can be realized through all paths. All religions are true. The important thing is to reach the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo steps or by a rope. You can also climb up by a bamboo pole.”

-19th-century mystic Ramakrishna

“I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.”

-British novelist, Roald Dahl

“Never look backwards or you’ll fall down the stairs.”

-Writer, Rudyard Kipling

“Now, finally has the elevator arrived. The stairs was about to become a personal inferno.”

-Swedish Artist, Anders Zorn

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

– Civil Rights Activist, Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”

-English “man of letters”, Samuel Johnson

“The ambitious climbs up high and perilous stairs, and never cares how to come down; the desire of rising hath swallowed up his fear of a fall.”

– Calvinist Clergyman, Thomas Adams

“A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.”

– Former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt

Alice falls down the rabbit hole and her dress poofs up like a parachute.

Alice: “Well, after this I should think nothing of falling down stairs.”

– Alice in Wonderland

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

– Naturalist, transcendentalist and abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau

“The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.”

– Philosopher, Voltaire

“To destroy is always the first step in any creation.”

– american poet, e. e. cummings

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