Stairs and traffic lanes

Why stairs cost what a room costs

It looks like the odd line on the price list until you have done one.

A staircase has a fraction of the floor area of a bedroom and takes longer. Every tread and every riser is a separate surface worked by hand. The tool has to be controlled on a slope rather than pushed on the flat. And there is nowhere to stand that is not part of the job.

Pricing by square footage would make a staircase almost free, which would mean either rushing it or losing money on it. Nobody rushes a staircase for free, so what actually happens on a low quote is that the stairs get a fast pass and the customer is told they are done.

Why stairs get so dirty

Three things compound, and they are worth understanding.

Concentration

Everybody in the house uses the same twelve square feet. A four-person household puts more footfall on a staircase in a week than on an entire bedroom in a year.

Force

Going up a stair means pushing off it. That drives grit into the pile harder than walking on a level floor does, which is why stair soil is packed rather than loose.

The nosing

The front edge of each tread takes the most concentrated wear of any carpet in the building. It is where the foot lands and where the fiber gets crushed and abraded from two directions.

Nosings frequently stay visibly different after cleaning, and that is wear rather than soil. We will tell you what yours look like before starting.

Traffic lanes

The same mechanism spread over a larger area.

A lane forms where people repeatedly walk the same route. Kitchen to back door. Hallway to bedroom. Front door into the living room. Grit gets ground into the fiber along that strip thousands of times.

The lane looks darker, so people assume it is dirtier. Frequently it is both dirtier and worn, and the two parts behave completely differently. The soil comes out. The wear does not. More on that distinction here.

What actually helps

Free advice that reduces how often you need us, which is the test of whether advice is honest.

• A mat at every exterior door, inside and out. Most of the grit in your carpet arrives on shoes, and a mat catches a meaningful share of it
• Shoes off where that suits the household. It makes more difference than anything else on this list
• Vacuum the lanes more often than the rest of the room. They collect disproportionately and most people vacuum evenly
• Vacuum stairs properly, with a tool rather than a wand edge, because that is where the grit concentrates
• Clean on a cycle rather than when lanes appear, since by then the wear has happened
• Consider protectant on stairs and lanes specifically rather than the whole house

Hard floors downstairs make it worse

Common in newer Mesa houses and worth knowing.

When the ground floor is tile or stone and the carpet is upstairs only, every bit of grit tracked into the house crosses hard floor and then arrives at the stairs. Hard floors do not hold it, so it travels until it meets something that does.

That is why in those layouts the stairs and upstairs landing are frequently far worse than the bedrooms. It is also why a mat at the door pays off more in those houses than anywhere else.

Questions