Hall Makeover Reveal

Like a typical ranch-style home, our living room and kitchen are on one side of the house and the bedrooms are on the other. This hard-working hallway has doors to the bathroom and three bedrooms as well as two closets.  

Our hall is 36 inches wide which doesn't leave room for even a narrow bookshelf or display table. I recently painted all of the trim white and painted the walls a neutral gray.

I don't have a great 'before' picture, but if you take a look at the image below you can get an idea of the amount of oakey orangeness we had going on in the hall. I'm not one to always advocate painting all woodwork--I think it can be beautiful when done right. Ours was not. 

Wow--where are my sunglasses?! We lived with that for three years before my husband refinished the floors and I started painting everything else! Honestly, I'd forgotten how dirty and gross the before was and I'm even more thankful for our new, clean hallway! Whew! 

Here's the hall floor after it was refinished. I think it's one coat of walnut stain and a couple coats of poly. I like how you can still see the grain of the wood but there's no more orange! 


You can also see the terrible shape that the rest of the trim was in. Our home was abused before we rescued it! I just don't understand how a door frame to a bedroom can be THAT banged up after one previous owner (even though the house is 50 years old)!

Here's a short anatomy lesson of our hallway as you enter it from the kitchen. Walk to the end (the bathroom) and turn around and you'll see this:

I used off-the-shelf white trim paint from Walmart and worked in fits and starts. That's a lot of trim, folks! I mixed the gray myself using a slate gray-black I got in the oops section with the white trim paint, and used the slate color for the doors. "The Plan" includes eventually replacing the hall doors, but with needing new hinges and door knobs for these four doors plus the door to the basement, that adds up right away, so I chose just to paint them for now. 

One of my favorite elements of the hall makeover is these fun striped closet doors! They took way too much time and effort, but it gives the hall some fun character. 

Isn't that fun?! I'm so glad I took the time and effort to add the slate stripes to the white doors. If you want to see what is behind these two sets of doors, you can see my linen closet here and my craft closet here.

Another area I'm working on in our hall is a gallery wall. I'm collecting and re-framing milestone pictures of my three boys and will hang them as I get them done. When I was new to blogging I made this 'family rules' sign using stickers and spray paint on an old bulletin board. I wasn't thrilled with how it turned out--lots of underspray on the letters--but my husband really likes it, so I hung it in the hall. I do like what it says: it's the Ten Commandments in my modern language translation. I think that's a great set of family rules!
 

I made a display board for the plethora of art pages my sons generate. It's hung at their level so they can change out the display when they want. I'll do another post later with more images of it and my Pinterest inspiration. :)

Let's see another before-and-after of our hall, shall we? 

Before:

After:

Much better!