Help me find stair treads, please?
March 9, 2015 9:13 AM Subscribe
I need rubber or vinyl treads for my stairs. Any ideas?
The stairs in my workroom are old Armstrong tile and are both ugly and falling apart. I would like to replace them with proper treads in rubber or vinyl.
I've looked at Home Depot and Amazon, but I don't see anything I like.
I'd like to keep them under $10 a piece.
The stair measures 10.5" x 40" (26.67 x 101.60 cm)
There are 23 stairs.
They are wooden stairs under the tile.
I'd like them to be:Heavy (public stairway) Slip resistant Some neutral light grey or white - shading toward blue rather than cream or yellow
And that's about it. Does anyone have a reference or source to help me out?
If I can't find treads, can I just mastic cut vinyl to the wood?
Refinishing the wood is out of the question for reasons out of my control.
This one is good, but a little too expensive for what I have budgeted. If I could get this for ten bucks and just a little lighter, that would be nearly perfect.
What I have been able to find so far are the wrong color and too small or ridiculously expensivefor what they are.
The stairs in my workroom are old Armstrong tile and are both ugly and falling apart. I would like to replace them with proper treads in rubber or vinyl.
I've looked at Home Depot and Amazon, but I don't see anything I like.
I'd like to keep them under $10 a piece.
The stair measures 10.5" x 40" (26.67 x 101.60 cm)
There are 23 stairs.
They are wooden stairs under the tile.
I'd like them to be:
And that's about it. Does anyone have a reference or source to help me out?
If I can't find treads, can I just mastic cut vinyl to the wood?
Refinishing the wood is out of the question for reasons out of my control.
This one is good, but a little too expensive for what I have budgeted. If I could get this for ten bucks and just a little lighter, that would be nearly perfect.
What I have been able to find so far are the wrong color and too small or ridiculously expensivefor what they are.
FYI, I installed something similar on the stairs going down into my basement. The goals that we had were to have something that was durable and not particularly heinous looking and not brutally expensive.
Here's the problem - these are mutually exclusive for a product made to be installed in an institution as far as I know.
Roppe (which is the company we went with, IIRC) has the best variety of products but there are a few other companies (FlexCo, Johnsonite, etc). You also need to budget the adhesive because every product is going to have it's own weird adhesive made exclusively for them which may be unusual mixing ingredients and working times that make it impractical to do solo.
My experience with Roppe was that the product was straight-forward, cuttable with a sharp utility knife for trimming to size, and the adhesive stunk to high heaven and took a few days to outgas the solvents.
posted by plinth at 11:13 AM on March 9, 2015
Here's the problem - these are mutually exclusive for a product made to be installed in an institution as far as I know.
Roppe (which is the company we went with, IIRC) has the best variety of products but there are a few other companies (FlexCo, Johnsonite, etc). You also need to budget the adhesive because every product is going to have it's own weird adhesive made exclusively for them which may be unusual mixing ingredients and working times that make it impractical to do solo.
My experience with Roppe was that the product was straight-forward, cuttable with a sharp utility knife for trimming to size, and the adhesive stunk to high heaven and took a few days to outgas the solvents.
posted by plinth at 11:13 AM on March 9, 2015
Here's Johnsonite. They definitely make what you're looking for. They have a tremendous variety of tread types for commercial use, and they will also custom-manufacture special sizes and colors if needed. They are not as cheap as you want, though, and you'd have to find a retailer and pay them their cut too.
I would try to find a way to bypass the retailer if I were you. People order these sometimes and then their project falls through and they can't return them, or they're the wrong size; but they cost a lot so they don't want to just chuck them. I just looked for 'commercial stair treads' on eBay and found these. I don't know how many stairs you have that you want to pay $10 each, but if you're open to cutting things down, surely these would cover your whole area. Maybe Craigslist is worth looking at, too. I would recommend that you also call around to your local flooring retailers that do custom jobs just to see if they have any commercial treads in their warehouse--you might get a good deal that way too.
posted by heatvision at 4:55 AM on March 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
I would try to find a way to bypass the retailer if I were you. People order these sometimes and then their project falls through and they can't return them, or they're the wrong size; but they cost a lot so they don't want to just chuck them. I just looked for 'commercial stair treads' on eBay and found these. I don't know how many stairs you have that you want to pay $10 each, but if you're open to cutting things down, surely these would cover your whole area. Maybe Craigslist is worth looking at, too. I would recommend that you also call around to your local flooring retailers that do custom jobs just to see if they have any commercial treads in their warehouse--you might get a good deal that way too.
posted by heatvision at 4:55 AM on March 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by slogger at 9:37 AM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]