So I had a painter paint my handrails and various accent pieces...it was pretty expensive and I don’t have wood risers (mine are carpet). It looks nice for time being but it didn’t do exactly what I wanted, which was to modernize the staircase. My spindles are still traditional looking and no paint will fix that. So before you do anything, I’d start with painting the walls. You’d get a big bang for your buck by changing the wall color, in my opinion one color throughout would look better for flow and really open your house up. Here are my stairs, before they painted it was solid white. It took 2 days to paint with 2 guys and was $1600 I think. It’s because it is very time consuming. There is no way I would have attempted it myself, and I have painted a lot of stuff in my house, I’m a pretty seasoned DIY-er. I just knew this project was way too big for me.