Before and After of an Entry Way

I’m thankful I married a man who is willing to do a few house projects. He understands I take a bit of joy in having our home appear aesthetically pleasing to my eye. It seems as though our ‘house project’ list never ends, but we do tend to finish a few projects along the way.

When we bought our home, it was relatively new (and still is). Our house is about eight years old now. Nothing was terribly outdated in our home, but it definitely had the ‘builders grade’ type feel. We have slowly transformed spaces in our home to reflect us a bit better.

Being in the thick of the child rearing years, anything we do must be kid friendly and be 90% practical. 🙂

Here are few before and afters of our entry way re-do. In the coming days and into next week, I will post about the dresser you see there (we dragged it out of our neighbor’s trash pile!), the planked wood wall hanging, and a door knob hanger that you can’t see in the below picture.

Sources:
Butterfly paper found here at Papersource
Galvanized ‘R’ is from Hobby Lobby
Copper clips from Anthropologie
Copper Light Fixtures from Industrial Light Electric on Etsy
Daylight Globe Bulbs from Amazon

Here’s the before picture:

I loved this entry way for three or four years. The Pottery Barn ‘Buxton Blue’ paint on the top half and Benjamin Moore’s ‘Floral White’ on the bottom. All those frames were Salvation Army purchases that we spray painted. Even the mirror was a $5 find at a thrift store. The dresser was my husband’s in college. A friend gave it to him for free. We painted it years ago and put new knobs on it, and we thought it was the best thing ever.

You know? For four years, this entry way served us well.

Everything started changing when I made mention of our off white ceilings to my husband. At first it was a fleeting, kind of unrealistic wish I had. I wanted our ceilings white. All the ceilings in our home were painter’s beige. For clarity’s sake, know they weren’t just off white. They really were beige.

I didn’t think much about them for years. I figured it was just a rule of thumb to have beige ceilings. I thought maybe it was a decorating faux pas to have white ceilings.

We had a few discussions, and my husband set to work painting the ceilings. We are like most families with young children, though, and free time isn’t found in abundance. Peter went section by section.

He started with our playroom, then our breakfast nook, then the kitchen, then the entry way, and finished with the vaulted ceiling in our living room. We have a completely open floor plan so we couldn’t really go room by room.  In other words, all the rooms I just mentioned share the same ceiling.

After the ceilings, we painted the front door. The dark red was nice for a time, but red is a color I don’t work well with. Whenever I try to use red in my home decor, I always feel trapped. I can’t figure out how to coordinate anything with red.

So the door was painted gray. It’s the same color gray as our playhouse. I’m attempting to keep things coordinated around our home. 🙂

Then we painted the walls. We took everything down off the walls and filled in the nail holes.

We painted over the blue with a bright white by Benjamin Moore called Chantilly Lace. We made the mistake of not priming first. Even though the blue on the walls wasn’t too dark, we could have spared a coat of expensive paint if we had primed first.

We then painted the bottom half in Benjamin Moore’s Iced Cube Silver.

Once the painting was done (we only dropped one open can of paint up side down on the floor), we moved on to some fresh decor.

We received these new copper light fixtures in the mail just last week, and they were the final piece we were waiting on to call this project complete. I am so so so very thankful we were able to find some daylight globe bulbs on Amazon. We like the daylight bulbs so much better than the standard light bulbs that cast a somewhat yellow hue.

Peter is what I would call a handy husband. If I can come up with a realistic and somewhat sketched out project, he can usually make it happen. We talked about what we needed most in the entry way, and out came the below projects.

Check back in the coming days, and I will show you all about:

1. The dresser we pulled out of our neighbor’s trash (is that proper neighborhood etiquette?) It was our right next door neighbor’s trash:

2. The large planked wall hanging we have for changing out pictures easily:

3. A door knob hanger strong enough to hold a diaper bag:

Here is one final after shot of our new entry way.

Linking up at A Stroll Thru Life today!