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.

Not Quite Easy

I spent Saturday painting the trim of the stairwell and then stopped before edging the gray because I realized there was a slight problem. The handrail. It's going to be pretty impossible to paint the wall without removing it but suddenly I was stumped as to the best way to do that.

I suspect the best way to do it (i.e. the way to not ruin all the holes and make them unusable) is to remove the screws holding the hardware to the actual wood handrail. Would the holes still be small enough then to slip the handrail right back into place when I'm done painting? It would be much easier to paint the wall if I removed the hardware at the wall, but I suspect I will do more damage to the plaster and have to fill the old holes and create new ones. That seems like a lot of unnecessary damage to the wall. Though maneuvering around them with a paintbrush doesn't exactly sound fun.

Either way, we're going to have to take one set of hardware off. See the second one up from the bottom of the picture?

Not only is the spacing completely off (the hardware appears to have been installed completely at random and we don't really care about that too much) but it turns out that it's not actually attached to the wall anymore. We can slip the screws in and out just by tugging on them. So however we remove the rest of the hardware, that one will have to come out entirely and be moved, which means holes to fill, new holes to drill (in both the handrail and the wall) and Spackle to sand. No wonder I lost my momentum on this project.

So the question for you, reader, is whether or not to remove the 2 screws on the handrail or the 3 screw on the wall, for those holders that are still functional. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Another weird problem: now that we fixed all the hallway light bulbs, we discovered  that the switch on the right (which we thought went to the light with the broken bulb) actually doesn't go to anything. We thought one went to each light, but the black switch on the left apparently goes to both, leaving us clueless as to what the one on the right goes to. At some point, we'll have to have an electrician come and sort that out.

And just because I can, here's a picture of the morning after a big snowstorm. The snow was so thick and wet that it was slipping down our roof in one giant mass. We had some pretty monstrous icicles too but D knocked them off so that we wouldn't be impaled. I especially enjoyed watching the "hat" on our lamppost slowly shrink throughout the day: