Stairway to Heaven

It wasn't long until Tony and I realized we needed a miracle with this stairway makeover. We knew immediately we weren't going to keep carpet on the stairs (or anywhere in the house for that matter). So it was one of the easier challenges we knew we could pursue first. Here's what we started with...

Tony began by removing the carpet which happend to be nailed and stapled ALL OVER in every nook and cranny you can possibly find. This is what it looked like after...

It seemed to have been painted orange before it was covered in carpet. You can see some wood peeping through right in the middle of the staircase. Wood is exactly what we wanted to see since we intended to stain the staircase to match our new wood floors. But let's not forget all the staples and nails that I mentioned before. This little plyer was my best friend for the next hour or so. I wasn't alone either. Tony had a plyer of his own and spent that hour pulling out nails and staples too. We tried our best to get them all out so we can make sure each riser and tread were ready for stripping.

After removing the wrought iron railing, Tony attempted to use paint stripper. To our surprise it seemed to have worsen things. You can see what the bottom few steps looked like after he applied the paint stripper. Unfortunately it frightened us both and left us no choice but to paint the stairs instead of staining them. Neither of us have ever stripped paint off wood to its original finish so we didn't think this was the right project to try it for the first time.

So I proceeded to sand them as best as I could with our Dewalt Orbital Sander. Once I was done I wiped them down with a damp papercloth to pick up any remaining dust. I used wood filler to cover all the holes from the staples, nails, and any other damage I could cover up. You can see in the picture below how I applied the wood filler. I had to wait for it to dry to resand it smooth again to get it ready for primer and paint.

But the debate now is whether or not to paint them all white like this or white with black treads like this.

What to do? What to do?