A Super Stylish Way to Salvage an Old Staircase

"We love old houses—to us, nothing is too far gone to save," says Candis Meredith, cohost of HGTV's Old Home Love with her husband, Andy. So there was no way they were giving up on the the run-down carpeted staircase smack-dab in the middle of one of their restoration projects, an 1880s home featured in their new book . "Sometimes we’ll take a staircase all the way down to its original wood and sand it," notes Candis, but the rough state of this one's risers made that impossible. Instead, Candis decided to paint everything black—and then make the stairwell into a bold artistic statement. "I felt the house was so bright and airy that it needed something to give it some personality," she explains.

What looks like wallpaper or paint on those once-falling-apart risers is actually neither. It's a blown-up high-resolution image of a 16th-century Dutch flower painting , which Candis discovered on a museum website. "A lot of museums have these scans up for personal use," she says. "I use them all the time. I print huge murals on my walls, I do oversize paintings, I put them on fabric."

All Candis had to do was measure the height and width of the risers, add those measurements together, and crop the image to the resulting dimensions. She asked her local sign company to print it out on a roll of durable outdoor vinyl, which conveniently comes with an adhesive backing. Then, Candis simply applied strips of vinyl to each riser, using a credit card to smooth the edges. Any slight inconsistencies blended right in—those black painted treads match the background color of the painting, and that's on purpose. And in any case, "I like that it's imperfect," she says. In Candis's eyes, the fact that the stairs' nicks and scratches are still visible through the thin vinyl makes them all the more appealing.