the front hall

 

The front hall is entered through the main front door of the house:

Of course, someone somewhere forgot to actually provide a way to actually get to the front door of the house:

But no matter. All in good time, right? Ok, so if you actually were able to enter the front door of the house without having to slog over a half acre of grass, you would have originally opened the door to this:

It's a lovely center hall with high ceilings and a fantastic stairway, and it fills with light every morning. It just needed a 70's-ectomy. You can see the glue-down parquet tiles that continued into the family room straight ahead, but what this picture misses is the floor tile just as soon as you step through the door. It was like nothing we'd ever seen-- it wanted to be marble, but just kind of came out looking like someone had glued a bunch of leftover marble chips in some goop and polished it up. The installer thoughtfully left some tiles in the attic in case we ever needed to replace them, so we scanned one for your viewing pleasure:

Ugh... what is that? Well, never mind, it's gone now:

It's gone, along with the parquet tile, and more of that infernal linoleum:

When we removed the linoleum tile and underlayment, we discovered a great big gaping hole-- probably one of the reasons someone put down linoleum in the first place. Well, once again thank god for pine floor manufacturers and the people who love them (namely, us), because we were able to craft a patch in no time:

By the way, the flooring you see stacked up to the right in the photo is the engineered hardwood we installed in the family room.

We refinished the floors along with those in the rest of the house, painted the walls, and replaced a bunch of molding and trim that had apparently gotten smart and abandoned the place years earlier. This is what the hall looks like now (roll your mouse arrow over the top photo for before and after images, or click either photo for a larger image):

The end result is a great improvement on the original, but we've still got a long way to go-- the staircase is grand, but boy does it need work. That's sixty balusters, three newel posts, bannisters that connect the whole shebang together... yep, cleaning up that staircase is going to take a while, but we'll post photos when we're done.

 

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