Well, you may never believe this, but we finally got our act together and tackled the DIY runner in our back hallway. Mostly because the friends we borrowed the staple gun from were back in town and we needed to return their goods …. but details, details … I’m sure it would have gotten done without that deadline. ha!

ANYWHO

It went from this…

To this!

All in just a matter of hours.

Is it perfect? Nope.

Does it work tho? Yup.

Would I use this method for my front hall? Probably not.

But, would I encourage you to try it out? Absolutely!

I won’t go into a ton of detail because there are loads of tutorials online that are great. Like this one & this one.

But here’s what we did:

clean the stairs well
measure & tape out where you want the runner to be placed. Our stairs are different widths at the top and bottom, so we centered on the narrowest stair and went from there.
measure the depth of your stair & cut rug pad to fit.
start from the top and work your way down, stapling from the underside of the first tread, to the base of the riser, and again under the lower tread.

The trickiest part was connecting the two runners to create the illusion of one long seamless runner.

In our case, we cut the runner just under the tread 5 steps down and stapled it in place, then matched up the pattern as much as possible ( we couldn’t afford much waste & found that the pattern matched well enough for us without cutting anything - very lucky).

Needless to say, I was REAL worried I would be purchasing another runner just to cover one riser, but as it turns out, we had just enough. Phew.