The Hallway!

It's about time to post pictures of our finished hallway. Today we finally touched up a few spots and screwed on an air conditioner intake vent but other than that, it's been done for a while.

You may remember that it started out entirely yellow, with cheapo light fixtures and separating drywall. Here's a picture of the corner between the bathroom and master bedroom. You can see the dark lines where the walls are separating.

So we spent one whole evening plastering up the drywall where we could reach it and another evening sanding and wiping the dust. We learned that you are supposed to prime over plaster to make the surface look the same as the wall, so even though we didn't prime everywhere, we did put it on over the edges we fixed. Here's the wall going down the stairs. You can (sort of) see the white along the edges.

We removed the fixtures to be able to paint the edges. We were planning to replace this directional light that shines down the stairs, but it looked complicated and is not in a standard electrical box, so we put it back when we finished. We did replace the little gold bubble light behind it though.

Because we were painting edges high up on the stairwell ceiling that we couldn't reach, we bought a wide variety of tools from Home Depot. We learned, after searching a few stores, that corner edging rollers are made from super cheap foam and padding and that high quality ones simply are not available. Surprisingly though, they did a better job than we expected.

 

You can see the gray we painted on the lower half of the hallway, as well as the Ikea coat hangers I mentioned here and the matching brushed nickel switch plates.

We ended up replacing all of the hardware that held on our handrail, since the old ones were in a dingy rusted brass and we went with nickel for everything else. We also added two more, so that the handrail is more secure.

And even though the color is all strange and you can't really tell that it's white, here's the upstairs view. You can see the new light, new thermostat, and (if you squint a little) our new door knobs. In keeping with my apparent obsession with replacing random brass-colored hardware with nickel, we replaced all our door knobs too (which ended up being quite a project, since the new ones didn't fit neatly into the holes left by the old ones).

We managed to hang a few pictures but haven't yet figured out what's going upstairs. We know we want to hang a lot though, because white really isn't our thing and it looks pretty sterile right now. Hopefully lots of colorful paintings and photographs will solve that problem.

Today we also tried to fill in our sparse lawn with more grass seed and spent the afternoon aerating and seeding. I have some before pictures but I'll wait to post them until I have (I hope!) some nice "after" ones too. We also set an ambitious plan for painting the master bedroom and should be done with that by next weekend.