Over two years ago I wrote about my purple stairs and now, I am happy to say the day has finally come, phase two is complete – we have a stair runner!

Henry, our dear Golden is turning 11 this week so safer, gripier stairs have been on my mind as he has cataracts and has become a little slower and more nervous going downstairs in the mornings. I spent some time researching options online but in the end, I could not consider anything other than Dash & Albert. I’ve heard so many great reviews and the colours and patterns were hard to match (plus a company that puts dogs front and centre has my approval).

Luckly I discoverd the Halifax store Bellissimo is a supplier and I was able to see samples in person and even take some home to see how they’d look over our stairs. And, after a lengthy debate, my heart was set on Stone Soup. Once we knew which one we wanted, the tricky part was figuring out how much we needed to order. Our stairs have two landings and since we were installing it ourselves, we were not going to get too fancy with diagonal cuts and turns on the landings.

Here are our measurements:

• 11 treads (at 10.5″ each) : 10.5 x 11 = 115.5″
• 14 risers (at 8.5″ each) : 8.5 x 14 = 119″
• two landings (3′ x 3′ each) = 36″ x 2 = 72″

I emailed Dash & Albert and they replied with this helpful formula for quantity:

((Rise + Run) x Number of Stairs) + ((Rise + Run of Additional Landings) x Number of Landings) = A

A ÷ 12 = number of feet needed

Which meant, we’d need one 12 foot and two 8 foot runners for our stairs! 

So our rugs arrived months ago and have sat in our basement waiting for the big reveal but summer came and interior home reno projects got pushed aside until last week when I hinted to Mike that we needed to get back into finishing a bunch of things that were half done. The list is long friends.

Obviously he took my words seriously because when I got home from a saturday morning run, everything was out and ready to go! DIY game time:Turns out, it was actually not that hard – we didn’t loose it on each other and had the project was done in less than 5 hours. We laid a grip under the two landings and applied two strips of carpet tape on each tread and one strip on each riser. We used a staple gun to secure everything, which pinch in the lip of each tread nicely: The rug was trimmed and folded under at two points but it’s hard to notice Hello colours! David always asks why I choose to paint almost our whole house white and this is why… you get to have purple stairs and striped runners y’all!  Oh, and the birthday boy is happy too.

psst. I am not thinking of painting our bathroom door Purple to match the stairs since most of the purple is now covered. 

Here are some great step by step posts about installing a Dash & Albert Runner:

• Young House Love
• Design*Sponge
• Fresh American Style
• and some more runner inspiration: Sarah Richardson

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