https://imgur.com/a/t12gf This is one of many house projects the wife and I have done in the past 6 months. Our house is 90+ years old and has been updated in bits and pieces so there's always another project. The stairs are steep and narrow and were covered with cheap long pile carpet that became very slippery when matted down. We ripped that up and found what seem to be the original stair treads underneath along with remnants of previous carpet. It took 2 hours to pull out the carpet staples by hand with pliers and then several more hours to sand down the treads to remove the paint splatters and other crap covering them. The staining and poly-coating was a long process as well, we did every other stair one weekend and then the landing plus the remaining stairs the next weekend. These are terrible stairs to try and take 2 at a time so that was fun. We ended up with a darker stain color than we had intended to use but that seems to have been a good mistake due to the condition the stairs are in, the darker color masks a lot of the crap underneath. We went with a very "Pinterest" style project and used a textured wall paper on the rises. Soon after we finished the project we had a bunch of people over to the house and these stairs got a lot of traffic which revealed the choice of material to be a poor choice as the bits of texture fall off. Under normal daily use by two people it's not so bad so we'll hold off on refinishing the rises for now.
When you wanna do those stair risers properly, I highly recommend American Tin Ceilings. I used their stuff for my tin backsplash in the kitchen, and they are GREAT. Quality product, great instructions, great tools. And the results? Great, too. :-)
Ah that's a good source for those, thanks! I was aware of those products, but they're more expensive at the Big Box hardware stores. The stuff we used was on clearance, only like $3 for the roll which did all the stairs. That's really the only reason we went with it.