My personal opinion is that it would be a shame to paint over perfectly good wood. And I would never paint stair treads WHITE. As soon as you paint a stair tread white you then need to put a carpet down on it to keep it from getting dirty and nasty. Do you mean the riser? Anyway, why would your painter want to paint the stairs and keep a brown wall if your entire goal is to lighten things up? I would find a wonderful paint color to replace the brown and see if it makes you love the floors. I had a horrible, throw back to the 70's, floor length, blind thingy that took up our entire living room wall in a house we rented. I swore I had to replace it. We got estimates - $500, I thought about sewing something, all fabric I liked would have cost similar-- we finally picked a paint color we liked and decide to deal with the blinds later and we were shocked to find once the walls were painted the blinds actually looked good. I am so glad I didn't spend $500 on new blinds for a rental. If you do decide you absolutely can't live with it, I would paint the risers, not the treads. I did this also in the rental as they were pine stairs and the wood was terrible and cracked. It is a nice look, but again, I wouldn't go white. I would go with a nice accent color and make it a cleanable semi gloss because it will still get kicked and hit a lot with feet, shoes, and other random stuff if you have kids. Here is a link that might be useful: [painted risers[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/painted-riser-phbr0lbl-bl~l_79374)

Have your local lumber yard source out an approriate piece of flex-trim for you. It is made of a resin, and since it seems like you would paint it to match the risers, that would be all right. It's not inexpensive, and you must follow the installation instructions. (they want you to pre-drill the nail holes so it doesn't break) Nor would a piece of custom-curved wood shoe-mould be cheap. For this missing chunk of tread, you're on the right track. A dowel is probably not necessary, just achieve a perfect friction fit, and glue it in with five-minute epoxy. Casey

Best solution would be to remove the laminate nosings and replace with a hardwood nosing, and install the carpet runner inset. That would save costs on the nosings- as they are typically 6' long, if you are only installing 6-8" on either side of the carpet runner you could potentially do 4-6 stairs with one piece.

Exactly, you already have a hodge podge install there. Attempting to remove and replace ballusters rarely works w/o some cosmetic cover ups to follow and those end caps gots to go in the process. Either leave it alone or redo it all and be very carefull the quality of craftsman you allow to touch your staircase, there is nothing economical about staircase carpentars other than being quick with SKILL