The hallway in our house hasn’t been painted since the day we moved in. That was 16 or so years ago. It really needed painting! What a better way to spend my last week on Christmas break than painting our hallway! It certainly does give a great degree of satisfaction to look at the finished work of my hands!
As you can see, the one wall by the bathroom door was still rough sheetrock, since we had to remove that wall when we remodeled the bathroom… like 8 or 9 years ago??
And no, it’s not white, it’s a sickly, pale off-white that USED to be in style.
So, here it is after I gotten the walls all wiped down (boy, were my arms sore!), all the little holes and dings puttied, all the trim removed, and all the non-paintables taped (I hadn’t quite gotten to taping the trim strip at the top of the wall in this pic).
It’s all the prep work that takes the most time, but finally I got to the painting part! Here is the hall after the first coat of primer went on. What an improvement with just primer!
And then I could finally get to applying the REAL paint–two coats! It was still a very light color (it was hard to even get it to show up in the pictures), but at least it was a pretty color, a blue-green (think pastel blue mixed with mint green) that matched our living room color scheme.
So, here’s the before and after’s, from all three angles.
You can really see the change in color in this first one. I’m afraid it’s a little harder to see in the other two.
But you can really see how much nicer it is not have the ugly sheet rock showing in this before and after.
And here’s the last before and after from the other end of the hall looking back.
Ok, so it’s not completely done–we still have to sand and varnish and replace all the trim boards…. But, that will have to wait till warmer weather when we can do the stinky job outside, and till I’m on college break again…..
Sarah E. Brown 