Once our basement floors were installed, making the stairs safer was priority. We knew we needed traction and some padding for our growing family. Safety first, right? If you’re handy, you could definitely install this yourself. We would have tried but our contractor was already working on our house, so we took the easy road and asked him to do it for us. Here are the details on our affordable striped stair runner, that’s actually an indoor-outdoor rug, perfect for high traffic areas. Here’s the before and after of this room.

Stair Runners: The Best Rug to Choose for Your Stairs

Stair Runners: The Best Rug to Choose for Your Stairs

We used three indoor/outdoor runners (gifted from Annie Selke). Since it’s durable enough for outdoors, it holds up against children and still looks brand new. Annie Selke has a step-by-step guide if you want to give this a go yourself. I can’t recommend this rug enough. It’s soft, durable, and I love the design. We are not the best at DIY and both work (and have a toddler) so we prefer to have a professional handle these things. But – the process looks very easy and if I wanted to, I’m confident I could do it. I’m just all for outsourcing what you can to make life easier, and prefer to have things done the right way. 

We hired Safety Matters to install our baby gates and this one looks almost identical to the one we have. 

Dash and Albert

Indoor/Outdoor Rug

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Installing the railing

I should add that these stairs didn’t have a railing on one side. It looked a little stupid and more important, wouldn’t be safe for young kids. So when we had the room painted and stair runner added, we also added railing to match the other side. Here’s the before and after of this room.