Hey Everyone! I painted the hallway! Oooh! Ahh!
Okay, so painting the hallway is not a real big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I do have a few tips that you can probably use somewhere in your house. A new color, thicker trim and hardware stripping are simple tasks I’d like to share with you that made a big difference in my little space.
Our hall is very narrow and contains three bedroom doors, a bathroom door, a linen closet and an attic access. It was painted greige. All of it. The walls, doors and trim were all one big blob of greige.
I’m sure I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, greige makes me sad. I am on a mission to rid this house of every last bit of it. This mission will be a long one because the last owners used it everywhere! I shouldn’t complain too much though because as I take down outlet covers to prep for painting I find what the house had been painted before. Acid yellow and an odd bubble gum/peach have been found so far.
Here is the before. Sorry for all the dark pictures. The lighting in the hall is not the best.
So as I mentioned it started out greige. I had some light blue paint out in the garage that I thought would be perfect for the space. Perfect mainly because it was left over from another project and so therefore free. It was very pretty during the day, but as night came the lighting in the house changed and it turned into a glowing neon nightmare. So bright and early the next morning I went to my paint chip stash and found a barely gray color called Olympus White by the HGTV collection at Lowe’s. Down to Lowe’s I went. I didn’t bother getting a sample to test out because quite honestly that rarely works out for me anyways. Turns out that this color works beautifully as a transition color to all the rooms it leads into.
My husband had been out working at his parents’ place that weekend. When he got home he asked what I had been up to. I told him I painted the hallway twice, the first round went wrong so I had to do it again. He looked at it and asked, “So, you painted it back to the original color?”
What! No! It’s no where near the same.
I guess the original color didn’t have the same effect on him as it did on me.
With the painting of the hallway done I moved on to replacing the door trim. We have 1 1/2 inch wide trim on all doors. It lacks the older cottage/farmhouse feel I am going for so it had to go. The problem I’m running into with this house is that all our doors are placed in corners and there is not room for anything wider. I searched for a solution to this problem, but the only answers I could find is to either leave it small or make the other sides wider but cut down the trim for the corner side. This would leave it lop sided. Neither of these options appealed to me so I did my own thing.
I put the trim on as normal on the outer edge and top. I then ripped the other side down to fit.
This is what is normally done, but then I took the left over piece that had been ripped down and wrapped it around the corner. Now both sides have a beefier look. I had to do this with all three bedroom doors.
The doors, trim and new base boards all got a coat of Swiss Coffee. It’s my go-to white for this house.
A little tip on painting doors: Put newspaper down to keep the floor clean from drips and brush strokes.
A MUCH BIGGER TIP: If you set up a fan to make them dry faster it’s a good idea to remove the newspaper out from under door because if you don’t that fan will blow the newspaper up and it will stick to the newly painted doors while you are not looking.
Now onto the hardware stripping. The hinges on the linen closet doors had about four layers of paint on them. I don’t know how to describe them other than just plain yucky.
I made a couple google searches for an easy chemical free way to strip them. Turns out there is a way. You just boil them with baking soda. I bought a soup pot from a thrift store for this project because there is no way I would cook in a pan after paint had been boiled off in it. For this task all I had to do was put a good layer of baking soda in the pot, put my hardware on top and add just enough water to cover it all. It’s only suppose to take 30 minutes, but I left mine in for an hour.
I’ll tell you what, that paint slid off on it’s own in spots! I had to scrape with a pointy screw driver or a tooth pick for the hard to reach areas, but it was nothing too laborious.
There they were sparkly clean. Can you guess what I did to them next? That’s right, I painted them. I took them outside and sprayed them ’til the brass was gone. I had already installed new hinges and door knobs in an oil rubbed bronze finish on all the doors so painting them to match was the right thing to do.
Last thing to tackle was the attic access door over the stairs.
Well, my first plan was to just decorate the walls. I had originally wanted to hang the kids’ pictures up in the hall, but with it being so narrow I could envision very clearly the first time the kids would come racing down the hall with a their pillows and blankets. The frames would get knocked and all those adorable faces would come crashing down the stairs. So I moved on to painting something fun on the walls, birch trees to be exact.
I have to admit a little problem/compulsion I have. I tend to take a little idea and blow it up into a massive project that is so big that there is no way I can ever do it or get it done in a timely way. I had the birch tree mural turned into a whole forest being painted with an owl sitting at the top of the stairs. Giving that idea some more thought I could picture the kids being scared of the creepy owl that was going to swoop down on them as they went to use the bathroom during the middle of the night. I like to sleep at night and didn’t want to have to escort anyone to and from the bathroom so out went the forest and the attack owl.
As I thought about it some more the little access door reminded me of a hay loft door to a barn. Painting it to look like a barn door was an easy idea to put into action. The hardest part was taking it down to paint.
I went out back and got the ladder, which my kids named “Mr. Dangerous,” but it was too big, so back out I went and got the slightly smaller one, “Miss Tippy.” She was just right. The door came down easily and after a few gray lines were added to look like boards and black was put on for strap hinges it was put back up and I got to call this project done.
I sure wish I could take better pictures so you could see how light and pretty the hallway turned out. But even though you can’t see how pretty it is hopefully the beefy trim and boiled hardware got you hungry for a project of your own.
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