I recently went through this carpet->wood on stairs conversion myself. We had 17 stairs + a landing and an extra step up to the landing. I used pre-finished 5" maple planks (engineered) on the treads to match the wood in the rest of the house. We bought pre-finished nosing for each step ($$$). For the risers I used 1/2" birch plywood painted white (nice contrast with the dark wood). Overall, I'm happy with the end result. However, it wasn't easy and took a long time. 1) it's a lot of work, and, if you don't put some thought and time into it, it will show 2) Walls and stairs are rarely straight, perpendicular, parallel, or aligned in any direction to make this job easier. Each and every cut will be unique 3) Our staircase has a stringer on each side - no balusters to worry about, but that doubles the number of unique cuts to make 4) pre-finished nosing is expensive. Our steps are 42" wide. The nosing comes in 78" sticks. I didn't want a splice in the nosing, so that meant one stick for every stair 5) After we started, I found some places online that sell one piece treads. I'm not sure that it would have been cheaper than fitting multiple planks on each step, but it would probably be a lot less cutting. 6) with 17 steps, the less trips down to the saw and up to test the fit on the top step the better. Of course the top stairs are probably going to be the ones hardest to get right I found the hardwoodflooringtalk website to be very useful during our entire install. There are several guides and a busy message forum. I recommend you (or DH) spend some time browsing it before starting. Unfortunately THS won't let me post a link to them here, but a google search for "hardwood flooring talk" should get you there. Good luck!

Be aware that if you pull off the scroll pieces they're likely trimming over a joint that you don't want exposed. So you may need to replace them with something, albeit in a different style. It also looks like the scroll pieces go underneath the cove molding that's under the treads. That will make for more difficult removal, and it may take the cove molding off with it. Painted risers/trim with stained treads is a perfectly acceptable modern look. Here's what we did with ours: Squaring off the treads would be tough to do in place. You could remove them and square them pretty easily with a router, but the remove/reinstall would be a pain. I think the curved edges look perfectly fine. Consider replacing the square balusters with wrought iron ones. As long as the existing balusters are no more than 4" OC, you could use the existing holes and just swap them out.

Shannon - Thanks for confirming that it was the right choice to do a white spindle. We considered replacing them totally with thicker wood spindles, which would have been easier as they would have sprayed them white before installing them, but couldn't justify the cost given we had perfectly good spindles. Ajsmama - I'll have a look at your other post as I can't visualize your space. All - We'll keep the chandelier for now, good to know that it's not so horrendous as main entry chandeliers cost a pretty penny! It's a lot of vertical space to fill as well, so I'm sure it will be another investment piece. Dilly, I like the idea of spray painting it with a metallic paint. We have to clean it anyway, so we'll have to take it down and can paint it then depending on how lazy we are. =) Dlm and Flyleft - So glad you posted. We just bought the paint and decided to do a pearl finish, which is the same we used for our baseboards. Metromom - Just do it! You'll feel lazy at first but once you get into it, you'll be so happy on the amount of money you saved, not to mention that you'll be more careful in avoiding paint drips as people who don't live with you JUST DON'T CARE. Good luck! Fly - I love this floor SO much, especially after living relucantly with the golden hardwood floors for years. I have a long story about the THREE TIMES we refinished this floor in order to get it this colour. It was completely worth it, even photos don't do it justice. Here's another look at the floors in our semi-done kitchen:

I understand that OP needs it to be cheap until closing because this is a lender requirement (not unusual) and if it is fixed before closing, it becomes a fixture and stays with the property even if the buyer doesn't close. CONSIDER: A solution to this would be a rehab type loan rather than the typical purchase loan. Benefit to the buyer is they don't need to resort to expensive hard money type loan as mentioned up thread. Also it gives the buyer the TIME to figure out a permanent solution. The buyer can close right away on a rehab loan. The disadvantage to a rehab loan is that the interest rate is slightly higher than your typical purchase mortgage. Something to explore.