Tag: hallway

The Hallway! She is Being Painted!
Right. So, we hired painters to come in and do it for us.

I actually really like painting — I find it relaxing! But this pregnancy has been somewhat difficult and with the baby due later this month, I just could not do it myself. Brandon and our brother-in-law, Enrique, primed just the new portion of the hall on Labor Day, but we hadn’t been able to get any further with the project. It was becoming pretty clear that we weren’t going to be able to finish the job in a timely manner.

The painters started on Friday, and they’re finishing up today, but it already looks pretty great after just the first coat. Behold our nearly smooth and straight walls and ceiling! (Yes, there’s some wonkiness. The house is old, yo.)

The hallway, front stairway, and entryway are all getting the same color on the walls as our bedroom (Sherwin-Williams’ Comfort Gray), and a shade lighter on the ceiling (Sea Salt). It’s a pretty gray/blue/green color that plays really nicely with the wood throughout the house.

Still to do:
- One more coat of paint each on the ceiling and on the walls.
- Strip the window and door frames. We are considering just painting them brown as a short-term solution and then stripping them sometime down the line with there isn’t a pregnant lady (or a newborn) to worry about in the house.
- Finish the floors. (I’m going to go into more details on the flooring in a post tomorrow — what we chose and why.)
- Replace the three hallway lights with new fixtures so that they all match.
- Replace the light switches with push-button switches. (I am inordinately excited about this change.)
- Put the doorbell cover and outlet coverplates back on.
- Maybe find new runners?
- Find a storage piece to go in the hall (there’s a spot for something tall and shallow just to the left of where I was standing to take the hallway photo).
- Hang some art? This isn’t exactly pressing. I’m kind of happy to admire our hallway as it is for a while. The window is visible down the hall again for the first time in decades! Natural light FTW!
- Skim coat the walls and ceiling along the back stairway. Eventually, I’d love to have nice, smooth walls there painted to match, but that’s a project for another time. We’ve left the textured walls along the back stairs white for now.
September 8, 2014
The Second Floor is Taking Shape

Hey, no more visible lathe! We have walls!

That’s the door we’re going to reuse for the new nursery, casually hanging out all akimbo at the end of the hall there. You know, where the 125-year-old subfloor is exposed? Living with the floor ripped up like that for a few weeks hasn’t been as bad as we initially thought it would be, but one of the kids’ bedrooms is over there so we will be glad to have an actual floor down sooner than later.

The wood on the second floor wasn’t in great shape when we bought the house, and when we started pulling it up for this project, we saw why. It’s a very thin material — not nearly as nice as the solid wood downstairs. It’s old for sure, and it has reached the end of its useful life, so we’re going to go ahead and redo the whole hallway rather than just patch the portion that we’re working on now. It’s something that we knew would need to be addressed eventually, but doing it now will mean holding off on some of the more fun stuff we’d rather spend our money on. (Sorry, potential front porch swing. Maybe another time.)

There was a strip of wood molding along the walls in the former kitchen (soon to be nursery!) at chest height, matching up with where the beadboard backsplash behind the kitchen sink ended. After the wood was removed, the wallpaper had to be partially stripped so that any patching to be done could adhere directly to the wall. It looked like the paper was just applied over bare drywall in some sections and we were worried about potential damage, but it’s peeling off fairly cleanly and easily with just water. After our contractor is done working in there, Brandon will finish stripping the remaining wallpaper.

I’m about seven weeks from the baby’s due date now, so I’m not sure how the timing’s going to shake out, but the baby will sleep in our bedroom at first anyway. Really, we’re just aiming to get the loudest, most disruptive work completed in time, and thankfully that looks like it will be on schedule.

August 4, 2014
Moving the Door Over

We’re still a ways off from finishing the conversion of the kitchen on the second floor into a bedroom and finishing the hall, but it’s moving along.

We were going to keep the original doorway to the room and reuse one of the other doors to fit. The cabinetry is staying though, and it would have been difficult to find a good spot for a bed without making the room awkward or blocking access to drawers. So I talked to Brandon and the contractor about it and we decided to move the door across from the other bedroom door on that side of the house.

(You can see the original plan here.)

The hallway bumps out into the room a little on that side (where the door will now be placed) because we didn’t want the hall to feel cramped, and it also makes it easier to bring furniture in and out of both rooms. Since the radiator is behind the door (and thus unusable floor space anyway), it doesn’t make much of a difference on the new room itself, and the little nook that will now be next to the door will be a great spot for a comfy reading chair or a desk.

My sister came by over the weekend, and I was explaining the dangers of scope creep to her. We’re moving the door, which means we’ll also need to move the room’s light switch over. We need to put down new flooring from where the hallway built-ins started all the way to the bedroom doors, and now we’re wondering if we should redo the flooring in the entire hallway at once. I’m not looking to change the look of the wood — it’s appropriate to the house — but there are a couple of soft spots that do need to be addressed eventually.

And then there’s the whole issue of finding a replacement for the bathroom storage that we lost. There is a huge bedroom closet that could be split into two, with half of it accessed from the hallway near the bathroom. We could probably even reuse some of the wood that we saved from the built-in that was removed, but that isn’t a project that we’re going to do right now. Instead, I’ll reorganize the small linen closet down the hall and be on the lookout for a shallow dresser, cabinet, or armoire to place near the bathroom.

Moving along, moving along…

July 21, 2014
The Hallway, Opened Up

Our contractor got started last week on our second floor remodeling project. After just two days, the built-in was removed and the hallway was opened up. We have natural daylight in the hall now, from the window that was blocked off before!

There is a large bedroom closet that we could divide and tap into from the hallway if we ever want to add more storage near the bathroom, but it’s not in the plans right now. And though the built-in had been there a long time (70-80 years?), it was not original to the house. There were a few layers of some very old wallpaper hiding beneath it, confirming that the hall once went straight through.

The floor beneath was gone though, and the stuff on the stairway side is ugly high-traffic carpet over red linoleum over a couple layers of who-knows-what. So yeah, the floor is going to need some work, but we expected that going into this.

There’s still a lot of work to go, but it’s looking really good so far!

July 15, 2014
Demolition Ahead

We’re about to start on some big changes to the second floor of the Victorian!

Thank you so much for all of the input and comments when I first wrote about our possible plans for the space (here and here). We’re still mostly going with my initial plan for reconfiguring the hallway, but I was swayed to keep the kitchen cabinetry. We’ll reuse it as closet and dresser space, as well as storage for books and toys.

Having all of the built-in storage in the hallway right outside of the bathroom has been great, and we’re sad to lose it. Making another bedroom out of an awkward second kitchen is worth it though, and we think it’s much closer to how the house was originally laid out.

The Plan

• Remove the sink cabinet
• Remove beadboard behind sink
• Repair or replace wood floor beneath the sink cabinet if necessary
• Remove plumbing and gas hookups from the kitchen space
• Swap out the sink for the one in the kitchen downstairs, if possible
• Remove the door and doorway separating the kitchen from the family room
• Trim door to size and rehang in existing doorway off the hall
• Remove the built-in storage and open up the hallway
• Remove carpet from the section of the hall near the stairs
• Repair or replace wood floor in the new section to match the rest of the hall
• Remove the door and doorway near the stairs
• Open up the end of the hall as much as possible (there may be issues with load-bearing walls and a need for headers)
• Add L-shaped jog to the end of the hallway, closing it off from the new room
• Split and relocate light switches (two switches are for the room, one is for the hallway light)
• Relocate doorbell
• Skim coat plaster walls in the hall section near the stairs (it’s textured, and the rest of our walls are smooth)
• Strip the wallpaper
• Repair walls
• Add baseboard trim to match existing throughout

There will be a whole host of other things to do when it comes time to decorate, so tasks like painting and selecting new lighting fixtures aren’t even on the radar yet. Right now, we’re just hoping we can get the construction portion of the project done before baby number three arrives in September!

July 10, 2014
Hallway Runner Options

There’s a new vintage runner in the entryway downstairs (I’ll have to rephotograph the area and share soon), and I’ve turned my attention toward the hall on the second floor. I don’t want to keep the wood floor bare because the kids slip on it when they have socks on, and Murray has a hard time getting traction on slick surfaces. Plus, a little protection for the original floors couldn’t hurt, especially in high-traffic areas.

We had gray FLOR tiles in the dining room at the old house, so I brought them out to give ’em a go. The chimney chase juts out into the hallway here, and there’s an angled wall opposite, so I like that I can custom-fit the runner to the space. (Obviously I would trim a couple of tiles to mimic the angled section.)

I liked the carpet as an 8×10, but the seams are really obvious as a runner. Part of that could be because the pieces have been rearranged though, and maybe if they were stuck together they would wear evenly and that effect would fade. (Anyone have experience with reusing and rearranging them that can weigh in here?) The gray color isn’t doing it for me either, but does that warrant get newer prettier ones in a different color or pattern when we already own these? Although we don’t have enough to extend the runner as far as I’d like, and this style has been discontinued. (Justification!)

There is a pink and white plastic runner from the old house that we also already own, which I used briefly in the finished basement’s craft space. It’s cute, but a little on the narrow side. We would need another one for the rest of the hall, and I don’t know if I’m loving it so much that I’d want a second one. And then what do we do at that jog in the hall? Side by side? Slight overlap or gap?

A lot of these houses end up with wall-to-wall carpet in the hallways. I’m not sold on the idea, but it’s an option. Use the existing FLOR tiles we have, use new FLOR tiles, buy a second matching pink runner and use those, lay carpeting, find two other runners (wool would be nice, or vintage Persian rugs)… there are plenty of options. What would you do?

January 29, 2014