28 May 2014

The Hallway Project: Part I

If there's one paint job that we've been putting off for years, it's the hallway.

The rest of the house has been painted in stages over the seven years we've been here - the first and most urgent job was turning rather garish margarine yellow walls back to half spanish white in the living areas.

Then when it came time to turn the small bedroom into a nursery for Mylo's arrival, we tackled that.

Next up was the upstairs bathroom which was suffering from peeling paint in the skylight. And Zircon blue the colour of choice.

Then it was the spare room and Noah's room turned to half spanish white in quick succession.

And our most recent transformation was the downstairs bathroom, from terracotta brown to zircon blue to match the upstairs.

We've been meaning to do the hallways ever since - really truly. It's just that it was quite daunting to even start the darn project. So we'd kind of just put it off. You see we don't just have one hallway - we have a whole series of them because our house is split over three and a half levels.

We have a garage on the lowest level with a set of stairs leading up into the house.

We painted this whole area - ceilings, skirtings and all.
And clearly haven't gotten around to putting the bannister back up yet - whoops!
Stairs are a bit of a bitch to paint with carpet already down too I've decided!

Then there's a small half level at the front door entrance.


Who'd have a cat - you might have noticed in the other picture of the stairs
that there is one very obviously picked-at stair - ahem Murphy!
Which is why he is now banished outside during the day when we're at work and school so he can't ruin any more of the carpet!

We also painted around both these door frames
They were looking pretty tired after fifteen years of use!


Then going up another half level is the main part of the house.



A mere 9 sets of doors and two sets of stairs to paint around so far!
 
After that there's our bedroom that's up a whole level of stairs again.

So here's where our job stops and the professionals' starts. We've down all the parts of the hallways we safely can, and now have to leave a professional to tackle the rest as the walls on the stairs up to our bedroom are so high and the angles so extreme that we'd have needed specialised scaffolds to do it (safely) as you can see from the Before Photos below.

Even so, it was no mean feat doing the part of the hallways we did tackle. It became pretty obvious that the hallways are the most scuffed and beaten up walls in the house so there were a lot of places that needed touching up before we could even begin to paint.

Then there were the 9 (yes you read right!) sets of doors we had to mask up and paint around as well as 2 lots of stairs, not to mention some sloped ceilings too! It was not a job for the impatient or fainthearted. We started over Easter and chipped away at it a couple of hours here and there including some afternoons after school where I sent the kids out in the driveway to play with the neighbours (which they love doing by the way so it wasn't a hard sell!) so I could do the tricky skirting boards in peace.

So now we await Part II - which is getting rid of the dark blue walls to match the other hallways once the painter can come. 






So just a few angles to manoeuvre around - it's in an entirely different league than painting a bedroom with four walls and only a door, a window and a wardrobe to paint round that's for sure!

Still, I'm really looking forward to seeing how light and airy the hallway looks afterwards....so watch this space!

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