Stairs By Design

After our fumigation, we decided to replace the carpet on our stairs with wood. My husband and I are very happy with Tom’s work. (Tom is the owner of Stairs by Design). He does more than stairs — he’ll do cabinets and any other woodwork as he has his own shop. We needed certain pieces to be custom made because of a side panel that was carpeted on the wall as well as shoes (covers) for the bolt plates. We decided to keep our old railing (sanding off the layers of paint ourselves).
We decided to order our wood pieces through a local company (that in turn had to order the stair noses to be custom made as well as order the wood itself) because we liked the design and variation. Stair noses are solid and Tom can make them, but in the end we just ordered them not knowing that the company (not Tom’s) needed about 8 – 10 days to send them to us. It was my fault for not ordering enough noses, so that delayed the project a bit.
We wanted some side trim pieces and so we had Tom makes those as well.
There aren’t many companies in San Diego that do stairs specifically. We had several bids for installation alone, and Tom’s was one of the best. Two of our bids were double what Tom and a flooring contractor had bid. His bid was also considerably lower than another local staircase contractor in the county. We went with Tom because we knew he could do custom work and he could start work in the time frame we wanted.
We love the results and couldn’t be happier. Tom will work with people’s budgets, he has great ideas, and is flexible. It wasn’t an easy process for me because I am so visual, but he really had great ideas and we are just so happy with the results. When we redo our office, I’m sure we will ask him to come back to install the flooring.
I will try to post some pictures. The ugly gray carpet came up higher than the wood side trims and we haven’t repainted the walls just yet, so please keep that in mind.