Hallway Heaven...or Hell?

Well, faithful readers, I'm a little farther behind than I had hoped, but progress is being made.  After returning back from our winter break, I decided to tackle a smaller, but nonetheless extremely important, project.

Our back hallway is probably the most heavily trafficked space in our whole house.  It's the hallway that leads to the back door, which opens out onto our little patio and gets you to the garage.  So, it's really the ONLY door we use to go in and out of the house all the time.

Now, I should pause for a moment to explain: "hallway" is probably a generous term for this space.  It's really just two small landings, each about three and a half feet square.  The first space is right off of the kitchen, and then there's a step down to the smaller landing that connects to the back door and the stairway going down to the basement.

In fact, it's such a small space that I just realized I've never posted a picture of it on this blog.  Probably because it's a very hard space to photograph...because it's so small.  Here's one bad attempt (excuse my terrible photography...I promise I'm getting better, but you wouldn't get that from looking at these photos!):

Blurry photo looking towards the back door...if you look closely under my paint tarp, you can see where the step is.

Somewhat less blurry photo looking straight on at it from the kitchen.

When we moved in, this "hallway" was just plain old white.  And by that I mean plain...OLD...white.  It was pretty dirty and beat up looking.  One of the walls (which you can't see in this photo) was the same color teal as the rest of the kitchen, so when we painted the kitchen walls we primed over that.  It's been sitting there ever since, waiting for us to have time to paint it (and figure out what color it should be).

We also thought we should paint the wall in the basement staircase that same color, since it all basically connects.  It had also been primed (it used to be the ugly living room purple-taupe) but was waiting for it's final coats of paint.

Looking down into the basement, also blurry...please ignore the mess at the bottom of the stairs.

I ended up deciding on the same beige that we have in our upstairs staircase/hallway.  I was hesitant at first because I wasn't sure how it would look right next to the yellow.  However, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.  It just fades into the background as a neutral and the yellow really pops.

Voila...finished paint job!

I'm still not tired of how satisfying it is to put a fresh coat of paint on a wall.  It looks SO much nicer having the beige in there.  It sets off the white trim and makes the house look more polished.

Speaking of the trim, it was an absolute mess, so that was the next thing I tackled.  Here's the "before" shots:

This was how most of it looked.

Door frame...yikes!

They'd added the trim at the bottom and never painted it.  The mess is where I'd filled in the hole from the door stopper, pre-sanding.

 A few fresh coats of white paint (same color as the kitchen cabinets, Alabaster) and voila:

Ignore the dirty floor...winter!

I did take time to sand everything down a bit, but wasn't going to go too crazy.  It's the back entryway, and it's going to get beat up.  There's still a lot of dings and scratches, but it looks much better now and it's going to get a lot of abuse.  I figure it's an area that will need a lot of touching up in the future.

While I was at it, I painted some of the trim in the kitchen, too:

Before (scuffed up)

Brody, get out of the way...

After!  Much better.

So, round one of the transformation is complete!  I've already made progress on a few round two projects...which I'll save for another post, another day.