If you have carpeted stairs, go look and report back :)

No carpet on the sides here, only the treads and risers...

no carpet here either just wood.. which ill be redoing soon. but ive seen it as well.. but the one time i saw it.. carpet on the side was of different shades...

Maybe it was done to keep the bottom of the walls and side of the steps from getting scuffed up? (kids/pets/frequently moving large things up and down the stairs?)

I think it was more an easy way to avoid having to do decent trim work.
This thread is like 7 months old, but sadly I still haven't done anything with it. Carpet likely just needs to be replaced and probably just re-carpet what is currently carpeted because it'll probably be a pain to deal with otherwise.

Dude, what is with the door next to the your stairs? That is even weirder than your riser finish. Does it open towards the stairs? Just a question....is that door part of a French door set? If not, and the stairs are blocking the doorway, your house may not be up to code.

the door goes to another set of stairs that take you down to the next level. It doesn't block the stairs, you can't open it far enough to block the stairs...

Well, here we are, about another year later (plus some) and still haven't done anything about the carpet... which is good... we've fostered a few greyhounds and between the puking, the peeing, and at least one poop barf (eat poop, then barf it up in the house, lovely) it's probably best we waited. Unfortunately we'll probably just end up re-carpeting the stairs, because there doesn't seem to be an easy alternative that would look decent...

Try these guys... Here is a pic of my townhouse that I redid

http://www.buystairparts.com/

Thanks for the link, I'll have to keep that in mind! It hasn't been a real high priority amongst other projects... at some point we'll be replacing the carpet in the house, but we've been saying that for a few years, we always seem to find other uses for the money . My goal is to fix this when it comes time to do the carpet for sure...

no problem. I don't have to worry about that anymore. We moved to Florida 3 years ago and my current home has no carpeting... only hardwood and tile. It also has no stairs as it is all one floor. We still have a few things to do. It needed serious upgrading. (houses down here are cheap) It always seems like I'm up for a project so I guess I didn't mind. This house was "wallpaper haven" so I had to steam it all off...prep the walls...sand..uughh it took forever. We had painters texture and paint though. New flooring in the living room, dining room, family room, office and 2 of the 5 bedrooms. The pool had to be emptied ,resurfaced and re-tiled. Then the whole lanai had to be jack hammered (it had this material that was called Chattahoochee River Rock on it and it was breaking up which cut up bare feet and just looked like crap. We had the whole thing resurfaced with the decorative cement/acrylic. Loos great. Next project... relocation of the hot water heater to the garage instead of the laundry room. We're also resizing it to 80 gallons. We currently have (2) 40 gallon at each end of the house and while that is great for showers and stuff, the previous owners put in a huge beautiful spa jetted tub in the master suite that they hadn't planned too well for. The water heater can't keep up with the demand. I haven't used it since we've been here. We're keeping the other 40 gallon at the other end of the house. The laundry room will be painted and new floor. As well as demolising the obnoxious shelf the current hot water heater is on and putting up cabinets. A new utility sink. Relocating The refrigerator that is there to just inside the garage. maybe I could move around my laundry room without being a contortionist soon. lol