February's Project: the Back Hall

Did you think Mary's room makeover was my February project?  It was what I spent the majority of my time on this month, but it wasn't THE project.




 Lisa over at Shine Your Light holds a monthly "before and after" party.  The first Friday of the month, you link up your before pics and the last Friday of the month, your after pics.  I needed some motivation to get started on painting basically every interior wall in my home, so I decided to start simply by painting my back hall as my February project. 

My before post can be found here.  But here's where I started:

Brown walls, dirty old rug, messy bulletin board and a very well-used doggy door.  Ewww!

Here's where we are now.

I painted the walls Gray Owl by Benjamin Moore.  The door got a coat of glossy black paint and I swapped out the rug.  There's still a little cutting to be done at the top of the wall that I didn't quite get too.

Beware.  There are lots of pics of the dogs.  They like to hang out in this area and had to get in just about every picture.

This bulletin board needed some work.

I couldn't submit my "after" post with such an unsightly object.  So, at 8:00 tonight, I decided to makeover the bulletin board.

I covered it with some fabric and added a little nailhead trim.  And, voila!

I'm not sure if I love the bulletin board with the black and white rug.  That's something that will be easy to change.  Especially since the rug was something I had on hand and did not purchase especially for this space.

I ran out of nailheads.  Oops!

See where the hallway curves around to the left?  I got that all painted, but I still have some art ideas for the walls that haven't happened yet.  Hmmmm, maybe for my March project?!?!

Happy weekend friends!

Striped Success!

I have been working on painting stripes in my hallway this week.  Here's my inspiration picture:

Source: google.com via Suzanne on Pinterest

Cassie at Primitive and Proper was also inspired by the same picture and this is her dining room:

My hallway before:

And after!

Painting the stripes was much easier than I feared.  I can't stand when lines aren't crisp and the paint bleeds through.  I thought this might be an issue since my walls are so heavily textured.  However, I didn't have any problems.  I used the green Frog Tape on part of the hallway and the blue Scotch Edge Lock on the other part and they worked equally well.  I just made sure to press the tape down and then I scraped down the edges with the edge of a credit card to get a good seal.

 The kiddos enthusiastically painted some canvasses for the hallway.

 Don't they say, "Never work with kids and dogs?"  They never listen and always try to steal the show!

 This is looking from the hallway into the bathroom I just redid.  I used the same color on the stripes as I used in the bathroom.

All that's left to do is paint the trim a nice, crisp white.  I also have to decide if I'm going to add a chair rail or leave the wall as is.  I painted the stripes a little higher on the wall than I initally envisioned, so the added trim might be at a strange height on the wall.

With trim:

Without trim:

What do you think?

The artistes hard at work.

Our neighbor Shanelle came over to help.

Have a fabulous weekend!  We are heading to Denver for a gymnastics meet and my parents from Minnesota will be meeting us there.  Then on Monday, we get our new Goldendoodle puppy, Emma!