Deck Staircase Makeover, Covering Up Some Ugly With Lattice!

Our deck staircase was NOT the prettiest thing ever. To be fair to myself though its not like I had built very many steps or staircases in my life when I put these in so they might look a little rough but they’re very sturdy! I had already flipped the step boards over, cleaned them thoroughly and put in new outdoor screws when I took the before pics. That helped a lot but I really needed to come up with a riser solution to cover up the ugly under the deck staircase.

In fact I’ll be taking this solution all the way across the bottom of the deck too as the random rocks, dirt and pea gravel under there is a bit of an eyesore. To keep things consistent I decided to do lattice for the risers – fortunately we still had some leftover for when I covered the entire underside of the deck. (You can see Lodi’s work here with the leftover concrete from one of our three slab pours this spring. He put in a pad to give our staircase some support – it turned out great!)

This is going to look a lot better but, its lattice so, ya know, everyone can still see through it lol and that’s been bugging me since forever around the whole deck!

Now with our new pea gravel lower deck it felt like time to take care of that situation for good. This farm left me with a few rolls of weed fabric that came from someone / somewhere at some point. I’ve been using it off and on ever since I moved in. I decided it would be the perfect solution.

I rolled out the weed fabric the length of the deck, crawled under there and attached it behind the posts with staples. What a difference! I had some trouble figuring out how I wanted to do it behind the gate. We’ve certainly used this space for storage before and I didn’t want to lose that but I wanted all of this to look the same so I didn’t want to attach the fabric to the back of the gate lattice. So I simply did not staple it down one post and just cut it extra long. Pressing it down and sticking a rock on it / behind it worked great! We can easily pull it up and crawl under there or use it as a storage space if we like. From there I moved on to the staircase. After taking measurements I cut the lattice risers out carefully using our skill saw.

Big tip here: Lattice is just stupid expensive for something that is so ridiculously fragile! Be very careful when you cut it! I had already brought the step boards out about an inch so there would be a lip to cover the top of the new lattice risers. Remember how I just mentioned how fragile this stuff is? Yeah, like I can’t even use screws without predrilling very carefully and risking splitting it a part. Even cutting it by hand is a nightmare.

First I stapled weed fabric across the front of each step and then I used long finish nails with a hammer. It worked out fine but it was a bit of a pain in the butt. When you cut lattice so small like this there isn’t much holding it together – one wrong move and you end up with a pile of kindling at your feet. I think it turned out ok though! It is certainly not perfect but still a major improvement from where we started and the sun will turn all the wood the same color with time. MUCH BETTER!