the upstairs hallway

 

We'll give you three guesses what color the upstairs hall was originally... no not Pepto Bismol pink, though we know you all just want more carpet comparison photos to pharmaceutical products. Much to our surprise (not!) it was teal:

And before you start emailing us, no we don't know who the guy in the painting is, no, we don't know if he's single, and no, we don't know if he's up for a blind date. Remember, all these before photos were taken during the home inspection while the prior owners were in the house.

The hallway received a much needed boost from the wholesale carpet removal project. Actually, as you may recall from our flooring story from the dining room,it took us a few tries to actually reach hardwood, and our first glimpse of the flooring in the house was of a truly uninspiring linoleum tile. The upstairs hallway was the first place we actually struck gold, or rather hardwood, on that project:

As dismal as they looked, you gotta believe there never were two happier people in the world to see such dirty, scratched gouged pathetic-looking floors. Heartened by our discovery, we continued on:

and discovered that though they were clearly going to need some serious refinishing, they were looking to be in salvageable shape. Huge sighs of relief all the way around. But were we going to be as lucky with the walls?

Most of the walls were fine (if you call plaster covered up with drywall "fine") but the left wall coming up the stairs was covered with the dreaded plastic paneling:

Even more dread-inducing, we saw no evidence of nails in the paneling. Yup, you guessed it... glue. This is what we found when we pulled down the paneling:

Sigh. Well, at least we got lucky with the floors. We've got a long way to go with this house, no sense in demanding too many favors up front from the gods of remodeling, right? So we set to work with a palm sander, and many, many, many sheets of sandpaper, and then many, many, many skim coats to get the wall smooth. The good news is, the wall ended up coming out just fine.

After some primer and paint, the upstairs hall currently looks like this:

Go ahead and roll your mouse arrow over the photo directly above. Yeah, yeah, we know you're disappointed that stud muffin in the painting's gone, but the hall really does look much better, doesn't it?

Like we said about the hallway downstairs, we've still got to refinish the bannister, and we ain't lookin' forward to it. We are looking forward to the end result though... isn't that always the way?

We finally did something about the bare bulbs that hung down from the ceiling and passed for lighting, though it took a snowstorm to do it. We actually bought the light fixtures we put up in the Fall of 2002, but they sat around until we got snowed in by a foot of snow in February 2003. How warped is that? Or how typical of a renovation project?

Well, they're in now, and we're happy with them. We'll let you know when we refinish the bannister, but don't hold your breath. We've got a lot to do before then... but who knows? Maybe all it'll take is another snowstorm...

 

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