Check remaining thickness above the fasteners, previous coatings, deep damage and whether any tread is beyond sanding.
Wrap the handrail, spindles and newel posts, protect the landings and seal the working area from the rest of the house.
Machine-sand the open tread faces, then work the nosings, spindle bases and inside corners by hand where no machine fits.
Apply stain if it is changing, then build the finish coats with the drying interval the product requires between them.
Calgary’s 1960s to 1980s housing ring was built with solid wood stairs that were frequently carpeted afterwards, and the inner-city pre-1960 stock often has original flights too. Under decades of traffic or a layer of underlay, a lot of these treads still have enough material left to sand. That is the first thing we check, because it decides whether the answer is refinishing or replacement.
Flooring Experts Calgary refinishes existing wood stairs in Calgary homes, sanding the treads in place instead of replacing the flight.
Refinishing is only an option while there is material to remove. Every sanding takes a little thickness off the tread, and each tread was fixed with fasteners set at a certain depth. Once sanding would expose them, that tread is finished as a sanding candidate.
So the assessment comes first. We look at how many previous finishes are present, whether anyone has sanded before, how deep the traffic wear runs on the middle of each step, and whether damage is surface level or structural. Splits, deep gouges and cupped treads are called out individually. It is normal to refinish a whole flight and replace one or two problem steps, and it is better to price that at the start than to discover it on day two.
Calgary's housing stock helps here. The 1960s to 1980s bungalow ring was built with solid stairs that were often carpeted afterwards, and the pre-1960 inner-city stock frequently has original flights. Under the underlay there is usually more wood left than the homeowner expects.
The handrail, newel posts and spindles are the reason stair refinishing takes longer per square metre than floor refinishing. A drum sander cannot get near them.
The railing assembly gets wrapped and masked before any sanding starts, then the sanding is done in two passes of a kind: machine work across the open faces of the treads, and hand work at the nosings, the inside corners, the wall string and the base of every spindle. On a flight with fifteen steps and thirty balusters, that hand detail is a meaningful part of the day.
Whether the railing itself is being refinished is decided at the quote stage. Doing it in the same visit is efficient. Doing it later means masking a freshly finished stair all over again.
Containment matters too, because a staircase usually sits in the middle of a house rather than in a closed room. The working area gets sealed off from the rooms around it, and the sanders run with vacuum extraction. That reduces dust considerably. It does not eliminate it.
The part people underestimate is not the sanding. It is the waiting.
Finish coats need a drying interval between them and a longer period before the surface takes normal traffic. On a floor you can walk around the room. On a staircase there is often no way around at all, and a house with one flight has a genuine logistics problem for the duration.
We plan that explicitly. Before the job is booked we set out how many coats the chosen product needs, what the interval is between them, and which steps are usable at which point. Some households move what they need downstairs for a couple of days. Some schedule the work while they are away. Either works, provided the coat sequence is set before the first coat goes on.
Calgary's winter adds two wrinkles. Ventilation is harder when opening a window means dropping the house temperature, and forced-air heating pushes dust around the building at the worst possible moment. Chinooks can also swing conditions noticeably between one coat and the next. None of that stops winter refinishing, and plenty of it happens here, but it does mean coats are scheduled around the heating cycle rather than around convenience.
It comes down to how much wood sits above the fasteners and how deep the damage goes. Surface scratches, dulled finish and traffic wear sand out readily. Splits, deep gouges and treads already sanded several times may need replacing instead, and that is a per-tread decision.
Usually not. They are wrapped and masked, and the wood around their bases is worked by hand. Removing balusters is possible but it turns a refinishing job into a carpentry job, and it is rarely worth it just for sanding access.
It can, and it is worth deciding at the quote stage rather than midway. Railings are hand-sanded and coated separately from the treads, and doing them later means masking the new tread finish all over again.
Less than it used to be. Our sanders run with vacuum extraction and the working area is sealed off, but stair refinishing involves hand sanding in corners no extraction reaches, so it is not a dust-free process.
That is the question to settle before booking. Some households can stay off a flight for the required period, and some have no second staircase at all. Where there is only one route upstairs, we plan the sequence around that and set out what the finish product allows.
It is workable but it needs planning. Ventilation is harder when it is cold, forced-air heating moves dust around, and a chinook can shift indoor conditions during cure. We schedule coats around the heating cycle rather than pretending the season makes no difference.
For budgeting we use the site-wide CAD planning range of $3 to $7 per square foot for refinishing work. A staircase is scoped per flight rather than by area, so treat that figure as context, not a stair price.