the back entry

 

The renovation to the back entry to the house started as a small, two-weekend project. As you can see, the rear entry suffered from the same malady as the rest of the house-- too much 70's. Dark molding and doors, dark flooring, low ceilings... a generally dismal way to enter the house.

        

Since the entry is part of the house added in the 1970's, we decided we had free reign to do whatever we wanted without regard to historical fabric... after all, who wants to preserve that decade? So we decided to strip the cheap, skinny 70's molding, tear up the dark floor, and give the place a good paint job and overall face lift. Easy couple of weekends, huh?

Well, after looking at it, we decided if we were going to open the space up, we needed to remove this closet (the entry had three closets, it wasn't going to miss one):

Then we decided if we were really going to open it up, we ought to remove this wall and pink door:

The pink door opened up into an exterior alcove. We include this picture of the alcove just for sheer amusement, because demolition revealed it had no less than three different colors of paneling:

So we decided since we were already removing closets, walls, and doorways, the ceiling could go, too:

We ended up vaulting the space, and used rough sawn oak, with a whitewash, for the ceiling. This photo is from outside looking in to the entry space:

The doorway you see straight ahead is to the powder room, and the french doors you can see to the far right of the picture lead to the studio.

This photo is from the opposite angle:

The chandelier is black wrought iron, and the walls are a yellow cream.

Since the two photos above were taken, we've added moulding around the doorways and ceiling, painted it a bright white, and added doors in the same bright white.

We've also installed a brick floor. We were fortunate enough to find a brickyard that sells the reproduction brick that Colonial Williamsburg uses for repairs to its sidewalks, and used that for the floor. The brick is sealed with two coats of high-quality sealer, and maintenance is a breeze. It gets vacuumed and damp mopped just like the hardwoods, and looks great while taking an incredible amount of daily abuse (roll your mouse arrow over the photo for before and after images):

As you can see from the above photo, we've still got to install the baseboards and shoe molding, and put a second coat of paint on all the trim and doors. We'll do that when we install the baseboards and molding in the studio, and trim paint it all at the same time.

We'll post final photos as soon as we're done!

 

return to gallery table of contents

home / about us / gallery / journal / links / mail