a grubby hallway is reborn

Like a grittier version of one of those makeover shows, we've been spending time beautifying some of the spaces in the house that we won't be able to really get to for a while.

September 2003

After realizing that it might be a while before some of the house sees demo and real renovation, we'd decided to patch up and make nice some of the rooms that we'd neglected. In three years, we've gotten used to certain things like holes in some of the walls and grubby paint on just about everything, so it is something of a revelation what a day or two worth of work can do on the surface of a room.

The upstairs hallway was one of the spaces most butchered when the house was cut into a duplex. The original balustrade was lost (replaced), a doorway to the porch was drywalled over (uncovered), and a wall was constructed (demolished) that split the hallway from the stairs. A locking exterior door was put into this wall and it became the front door for the upstairs apartment. Finally, all the walls and ceilings were covered with a cheap-ass orange peel texture and painted chalk white to mask the condition of the plaster.

April 2006

In taking down the added wall and opening up the space, the hall has slowly changed from being a dark corridor to something that we kind of like. We get a lot more light now that the porch door is in place. We got used to the hallway in that halfway stage, and then decided to patch the holes and paint and see what that might be like...

Getting prepped to paint meant scraping off as much of the wallpaper as we could, replacing the trim around the porch door, and patching the many holes in the plaster. The patching went on and on for weeks, as there were many areas that needed attention and the big holes took repeated layers to fill. And, like the outside, it took a while to find the right color -- the first yellow that we put up was too strong, like a highlighter explosion.