The Hallway: After!

I'm so excited to finally share these After pictures! It feels wonderful to have this project done, but I'm already looking forward to my next therapy session: the hallway upstairs. You see, I really have a problem with home improvement. I love doing it and I love having things done, especially things that I don't really love, like painting doors. It feels like a relief when I know that the doors are freshly painted and don't have to be bothered for a long while.

On this project, I even got carried away and primed and painted the doors, door frames, and some of the baseboards in Abby's bathroom, because, you know, we were already painting the door knobs, so I might as well make the entire door completely done at the same time. It looks really great against the still orange cabinet, whitish walls and still orange crown molding. 

Wow, that was a runaway train. Here's the BEFORE to refresh your memory.

So when you walk in our entryway, here's what you see of the hallway.

Notice the wood (that's the entryway), and the newly painted doors in the study (they are always open). The study is one of the only rooms that has decent paint already, so we are keeping it for now, although I don't know how long we can last looking at the hideous light fixture. Geez, I really need to focus here. 

This is standing in front of the linen closet, looking at Abigail's door. The doors to the study are shown closed, and then open, like they usually are.

This view is from inside Abigail's bedroom looking back at the linen closet door. I debated painting this door white, but once I started with the blue I loved it so much, and so did Bean, that we wanted to keep it. It was actually his idea to paint the doors blue.

When he suggested it, instinctively I said no, because who has blue doors?! But then I read an article in a magazine talking about why we do certain things, and if they really line up with what will make us the most happy. This rang a bell- why do we only paint doors white? Because we think we are supposed to? Because we are afraid to take risks? Because we think our friends won't like it? I would answer yes to all of those reasons. This color of blue is my favorite in the entire world, and Bean was suggesting it. We would love it, and we get to look at it every day, so who cares about those other reasons, right?

Can I just point out, as a former paint store manager of 8 years: the paint color on all of the walls and ceilings came from the exact same can, but the way the pictures are taken and the lighting makes some of the areas look like a different shade. Also, when we started painting this, it looked a little pink- mainly because our bedroom is green. Red/green are opposites, so they bring each other out, even if you wouldn't normally notice.

This is my favorite picture. It's the view of the hallway looking out of our Master Bedroom. On the left are two doors: Abigail's bathroom and bedroom. Turn right and you are in the other part of the hallway heading to the rest of the house. We did collections of sepia tone family pictures in this hallway, and added this awesome turkish rug to cover up some of the yellow tile (that will eventually be replaced).

Let's look at some of the details! The study doors were painted white, and we did update the finish on the pulls to oil rubbed bronze. Very easy to spray paint! This section of the hallway has black and white photos of New Orleans (our first trip together), New York City (we've been there twice together), and a country scene that fit perfectly on the first wall you see.

 I took a leap of faith and spray painted the yellowed switches white. I took off the switch plates, primed them, and then painted them the wall color. It took several coats at different angles to get the switches white. A safer alternative is to change them out for new switches but when we did that in our Master Bedroom/Bathroom, it caused some issues with things not working because of how old the wiring is. This hallway has 7 switches in it! So I didn't want to risk it.

Ah yes! Our awesome egg-shaped doorknobs. One of the first things I fell in love with when we walked through the house for the first time. They don't even make these anymore, and Bean had to watch a YouTube video on how to remove and re-install them since they have so many moving parts.

After he took them all off, I had several stages of prep: I primed them all with a red-oxide industrial primer, making sure to rotate and re-spray until they were completely covered. Then I painted them with Rustoleum oil-rubbed bronze, with the same process of rotating and re-spraying. I ended with a light coat of satin polyurethane (I had to go to Hobby Lobby for the satin finish).

I was debating skipping the clear polyurethane step, but I figured since they were such a pain to remove and reinstall, I might as well just do it while we had them off. We are so excited about how they turned out. All of the egg shaped knobs in our house, except for the hallway ones, are an old rubbed brass finish, but we also have newer doorknobs on some exterior doors that are oil rubbed bronze. It feels great to start getting things more uniform while still keeping these awesome knobs that are original.

Here's the rug that we stumbled upon at Ikea of all places. I found the same rug for the same price on Etsy, so if we decided to have one custom made for the other section of hallway, we know where to go. It's remnants of old turkish tapestries pieced together. Super cool!

One of Bean's pet peeves are so-called 'Titty lights' or 'Boobie lights'. They are standard on most houses, and he really feels that updating the lighting makes a huge difference in how put together a house looks. We generally agree on these kinds of things, so picking out lighting is easy. These each have 2 bulbs which added a TON of light to the hallway. No problem though!

I'm posting in the next couple of days about how I hung up the collage in the hallway. It was extremely easy, which made me feel so relieved since I usually can't stand hanging pictures. Thanks for looking at my hallway! I love walking through it multiple times a day!