Staircase makeover with wood look stair riser decals

Hi my friends, I finally came up with a way to incorporate wood into the staircase makeover to coordinate with our maple flooring. (If you missed the first two parts of the staircase makeover then you can read them HERE and HERE.) Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I love using decals and they were the resolution again in this case. I made stair riser decals out of affordable self-adhesive wood look vinyl that I found online and it almost looks like a wood inlay.

DIY wood look stair riser decals

Supplies I used:

I used my silhouette cameo to cut the stair riser decals out of the vinyl and you can download the DXF file (click HERE) and STUDIO file (click HERE) that I made for free from me. But you really don’t need to use a cutting machine. You could just use a crafting knife to cut out a traced pattern.

• Silhouette Cameo (HERE)
• wood look vinyl (HERE)
• crafting knife (HERE)
• transferring tape (HERE)
• measuring tape
• cutting mat (HERE)

I was super excited when I finally found a self-adhesive vinyl that matched our flooring exactly. It looks so real and is a great quality. And like you can see in the below photo it is made in Germany but available on Amazon HERE.

Just look at the wood grain and how real it looks! It gets really good reviews too and other people said similar things as I do about it.

In my last stair post I mentioned that I was sad about having to cover up the wood grain of the stair treads because they were in bad shape and that I really wanted to incorporate wood grain again somehow.

Once again if you are new to my blog then you can find part 1 and 2 as shown in the below photo HERE and HERE.

Instructions

It really is as easy as just making a pattern on a piece of paper, tracing it on the back of the vinyl, which has a paper backed side that gets peeled off and then cutting it out with a crafting knife on the cutting mat. You’ll just have to keep repeating that for the amount of your risers.

If you don’t want to have a more intricate pattern then you could just use some squares and triangles which are easy to cut out. I used some of them on my risers to show you.

Make sure you measure your stair risers and design your pattern accordingly to size. Or you just adjust my downloadable pattern file to fit your stair riser size.

Once my pattern was cut I attached it to the sticky side of the transfer paper so I could place in the center of my stair risers that I marked on each one of them. The nice thing with this vinyl is that I was able to reposition it if it was a little off. I’m however not sure if it is transferable again after being stuck to a surface for a while. We’ll see about that.

Here you can see the small triangles and how I placed them.

All you have to do is peel the transfer paper off and press the vinyl down again.

Here is a simple square and you can see that I aligned the grain of the wood pattern with the square. I just didn’t want it to be too random.

Maya matches the stairs too. Love the rolls on her tummy! All she cares about is food.

Now when you look down from the top where we have the grey bamboo flooring, you can see the grey treads but when you look up from the bottom, you can see the maple wood grain of the decals.

I was definitely inspired by my little tribal drum that I found at HomeGoods a couple of years ago which also has some other great patterns that could be used for a decal pattern. For example if you look closely you can see the star pattern that is assembled out of 6 diamonds. Diamonds are super easy to just cut out with a crafting knife.

I really couldn’t help myself again with Willy and had to photograph him. He was being such a model and loving his time in front of the camera. Just look at our ferocious little beast!

{see my leather tassel tutorial HERE and my giant tassel tutorial HERE}

Also check out the belowEtsy shop who has amazing stair decals for sale:

And it all ties in really great with my living room (click HERE for living room details) since the pattern of the stairs is similar to my favorite throw and pillows on the couch. It might be too much pattern mixing for some folks but not for me because I love it.

UPDATE: I have since removed the decals and written a blog post about how to install a carpet runner on stairs. I love this updated look so much.

I have so many more ideas for what you could use this wood look vinyl for and this was most likely not my last project with this amazing stuff.