For all of our ingenuity, we haven’t yet figured out a more efficient method (in terms of cost, energy, and space) of changing vertical levels than by walking up and down stairs. This true whether you’re inside or out. The stairs above above are under the Forth Bridge in a forest bordering the Firth of Forth just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Those below are from Kings Valley, Goreme, Cappadocia, Turkey.
The SoMoToHo, being a two-story home, has a staircase. When we bought it, the stairs were clad in a rather embarrassing cut-pile, short-shag, speckled brown carpet. The photo below gives some of the flavor but spares the unfortunate detail. 
Since we were having floor work done to match and extend the existing engineered hardwoods into most of the house, we decided to include the stairs. The pic below shows the stairs sans carpet and with wood. You might also notice that the wainscoting and trim have gone from grey to bright white (except for a small unpainted area on the left that I’ll explain in a minute) and the walls have been painted with Benjamin Moore Balboa Mist. 
The wood looks richer contrasted to bright white, don’t you think? Now – about that unpainted trim. As you can see in the next picture, the builder added a curving handrail at the base of the staircase with colonial-looking balusters that added to the SoMoToHo’s identity crisis. Is it traditional? Is it contemporary? Is it transitional? I’m so confused!
It had to go. So it did. But you can see that removing it left us with some obvious damage. 
The flooring installer (whose identity will not be revealed here) was neither helpful nor sympathetic. His response was “your trim carpenter can fix that.” As it happens, our trim carpenter – the wonderful Justin Cowden – did fix it, adding caps to soften the truncation of the hardwoods and finish the base at the wall. He also sanded and filled the bottom step, revealing lovely grain. Although he offered to refinish the step, I thought I’d try my hand at it. This shot shows the as yet unpainted trim and the bottom step with a couple of coats of stain. 
And here is a shot of the nearly-finished-painting trim with a couple of coats of polyurethane on the step.
And here is the finished staircase:
Our first thought was to replace the terminal banister with a black, powder-coated, sleek, metal fixture. And we may yet do that. But I rather like it without anything cluttering up the lines.
What do you think?