Work on the stairs first involves stripping all the balusters back to bare metal, stripping the mahogany handrail and stripping the staircase back to the wood. Some little repairs are also required. Once everything is stripped back it is intended to polish the handrail, paint the balusters an original gold colour and paint the stairs with faux marble (similar to the dining room fireplace). A traditional stair carpet and stair rods will then be fitted.

Time to strip the stairs now. The process is 1) heat gun & scraper, 2) nitromors and scraper, 3) white spirit and course wirewool.	Stripping the cast iron balustrade is a bitch but needs to be done. Nitromors is used since a heat gun is no good due to the fast heat transfer of the cast iron. This process reveals that the bottom layer of paint was a gold colour.	After nitromors and a variour scraper implements it is down to nitromors and wire wool. Then I used course wire wool and white spirit. Final finishing was with a wire brush in an electric drill and a wire brush hand tool.
Small wooden blocks have been used to complete the stair nosings on the rear edge of each step. Five of these were found to be missing so replicas were made.	The surrounding paint was stripped and the rear nosing blocks were fitted using glue and dowels. If the Victorians had used dowels they would never have fallen off!	Some of the stair nosings were on the curve and required some clever shaping and sanding.
The balusters are painted with three coats, one of metal primer and two coats of dull gold enamel.	With the top stair section balusters painted and the stair primed the overall scheme starts to look quite grand.	The detail of the cast iron and gold finish is starting to give a grand appearance to the Victorian staircase.