After cleaning the surface and dulling it, you may prime it with Zinsser Bulls Eye 1 2 3. That will bond to the surface. Brush through the grooves and roll the rest with a Wooster quality roller sleeve in 1/4 nap or foam. 4" ones work great.

Appply two coats of high quality acrylic paint in the same way. Be sure to roll vertically from top to bottom for a uniform finish.

I'm not much on stripping. Maybe Paintguy will stop by.

Michael

For stripping, a lot depends on the paint you are trying to remove...how old is the house? how many layers? any chance it is lead paint? Are you planning to paint or stain the treads once they are stripped? If you've only got a couple layers and/or if it's not lead paint, a heat gun may work well. Otherwise, you'll want a stripper.

We stripped the stairs in our last house - a 200 year old farmhouse with about 15 layers of flaking nasty paint. I started with conventional methylene chloride (I think) based stripper. Each application would get one layer off and it was taking forever - I worked on 2 stair treads for about 3 solid days and they still weren't done. I tried a heat gun but it wasn't all that effective either, plus it's not really safe on lead paint. Plus the bottom layer or two were milk paint, which is near-impossible to strip with either a heat gun or regular stripper. I ended up using Peel Away, which is a lye based product - you paint it on like paste and cover it with special wax paper. Then you leave it sit for 24-48 hours. When you remove the paper and scrape off the peel away, the paint comes with it. You then wash the new wood and spray it with vinegar to neutralize the lye (otherwise your wood will continue to get eaten away).

Peel away was great because 1) it eliminated a lot of elbow grease - the stripper did the work for us, 2) it was nasty, but not nearly as nasty as the meth chloride stripper, 3) it is considered one of the best strippers for lead paint because something in the lye bonds with the lead and prevents it from being absorbed by the body. Plus the lead paint stays wet and gooey, and never has a chance to get scattered as dust like it would be if you were scraping/sanding.

Alas, it's not all peachy though. Peel Away (at least the formulation we used - they have a few different ones) can discolor/darken the wood, so it's best to use on wood you are planning to repaint, not stain. We stained the treads and painted the risers and handrail and you could definitely see the discoloration where we stained (we prefered to think of it as "patina" though!). It also didn't get all the paint out of the little cracks. In places it made the wood very soft so we had to be very careful when removing it - we gouged the wood in several places. Oh, and one thing I noticed was that you REALLY have to soak the thing in vinegar (which raises the grain) - if you don't neutralize it enough, you will wake up one day 3 months later to find your new paint job sliding down off the wall because the peel away has eaten it away from the backside. (Ask me how I know this....)

Even with the Peel Away, it took us several months of weekends to get all the trim stripped in our house - it's a dirty messy job, but worth it in the end.

HTH! Good luck!

I found an old picture of the stairs in progress - brings back lots of BAD memories, LOL! Anyway, you can see how the stair treads weren't completely stripped - some paint stayed in the groves and dents no matter what we did (though sanding prior to staining helped a lot). Also see the blotchyness on the newell post? That's what the peel away can do to the wood - it wasn't nearly that bad on the stair treads, so it must depend on the type of wood. We had planned to stain the newell but ended up painting it because of the blotchyness.

And here's a pic of the completed staircase to show you how it all turned out. I don't have a closeup of the treads (they looked worse up close than in this shot) but overall, it turned out nice and was worth all the work.

Good luck!