I left the doors unpainted in the front entryway. (Thanks for your feedback.)
The door between the living room and the stairway shows its age a little (it’s original to the house, so 100+ years old), but I think it has character. We, or a future owner, could paint or refinish it someday.
And with that… hooray! All of the trim in the house has been painted — upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement! Happy dance time. I can finally cross that one off my list.
I’m painting the trim in the front entryway. It’s the last spot in the house to get a coat of paint, so I’m finally getting on that.
Would you paint either door there? I’m thinking of leaving them as-is, even though I’ve painted all of the other doors in the house. The front door is kind of cool, and the door between the entry and the living room (off its hinges and leaning against the wall while I paint) is the prettiest in the house. It’s not weird to leave them wood, right?
The stairs to the basement are looking cute. Finally.
The stairway is right next to the back door in the kitchen, which is the entrance we use most often. We used to have hooks and a shelf there for our coats and shoes, but we took them down when we remodeled the basement. Then the contractor mistook them for trash (an easy mistake to make), and thus we had nothing up for a while. Outerwear began to migrate throughout the first floor and shoes abounded.
I bought what I thought was an Eames Hang-it-All from a discount shopping site, but it turned out to be a fake. It’s fine, I just didn’t realize that when I bought it. But it’s here and it’s cute, and it’s great for the basement stairwell.
An Eames Hang-it-All
The stairs made installation difficult. I did make sure to locate the wall studs though, and I put together a quick how-to in case you ever need to do the same.
Bye bye, IKEA shelves that were mistaken for trash. Hello, accidental knockoff Hang-it-All. If my house were a reality show, this area would be the bad girl, stirring up drama. And it would be the lamest reality show ever.
This is a pretty simple before and after. We painted the walls pink (Wild Aster, Benjamin Moore) and the door and trim white (Antique White, Benjamin Moore). We no longer needed a shelf because we added a shoe organizer (from the Orla Kiely collection that Target had a couple of years ago), which makes the shoes much easier to reach. Then we hung our new hooks.
We also added children to our family, for the sole purpose of having a reason to keep cute hats and coats around for ‘after’ photos.
It’s working out well!
p.s. I wrote about August’s cute lion hat here.
I bought an Eames Hang-It-All from one of those invitation-only group shopping sites. You know… the ones I don’t typically like to shop at? And oops, I bought a knock-off. The tag listed it as a “George Nelson Timepiece” (huh?). It was cheap, yes, but I didn’t realize what I was buying, and for a knockoff it was pretty much the regular price.
That's a licensed Eames Hang-it-All. Mine looks mostly like it, but some of the colors aren't as vivid.
Oh well. It will be fine for the awkward stairway to the basement. We used to have some inexpensive hooks and a shelf from IKEA, but the contractors that worked on the basement remodel didn’t realize that we actually wanted them, so they were tossed. I guess they thought they were ugly relics that came with the house! Here’s an old photo of them in place.
I’ll make time to tackle installing the new hooks this weekend, and I’ll of course share photos after. If I don’t kick myself in the pants to get it hung, I’ll never get around to it! I’ve been meaning to do it for more than a month already.
