Making Our Home: FOYER AND STAIRS

Just a quick before and after before I go into all the details...

When we purchased the house, the foyer and stairs had baseboards, crown molding, and handrails that were dingy and needed painting.  The walls were covered in this blue wallpaper with peach flowers which obviously we didn't want!

The sidelights beside the front door had old lacey curtains.

Unfortunately we quickly discovered that all the wallpaper in the house had been on the walls since the house was built in 1987.  The bad news of this was that the was hung when the house was built and no one primed the walls behind the paper.  The wallpaper was hung directly on the sheetrock.  We were frustrated when we started steaming and trying to pull wallpaper down and it was taking off layers of the sheetrock!  We talked to a local shop, Just So Decorating, who suggesting using a Benjamin Moore product called Fresh Start.  

We had to sand the wallpaper seams in the foyer.  Wipe the walls down very well to get the dust off from the sanding.  Then we could paint on the Fresh Start product.  It is a primer that is made to go over wallpaper that is up really well.  It helps the wallpaper to continue sticking to the walls and primes them to be painted.  This stuff isn't cheap for a primer, but the other option was replacing the sheetrock!  After the walls are primed and it dries, you're ready to paint your color on! The Fresh Start really was a life saver!

The foyer wasn't too bad to paint, but over the stairs was very challenging!  We initially got a quote for someone to paint it because we were worried about how we would get the really high area over the stairs, but after hearing the quote I thought we could do it!  John's dad borrowed from a friend a ladder made to sit on the steps.  This was a life saver!

We started one Friday evening sanding, cleaning, and priming.  When we primed we had a tiny triangle that we couldn't reach at the top...so frustrating!  It was less than 1 square foot!  

On a ladder on the stairs priming.

Fresh Start

Check out this ladder made to sit on the stairs.

Now for the disappointing part.  The above picture shows the tiny area I wasn't able to prime.  We knew if we couldn't reach it to prime we obviously wouldn't be able to reach it to paint and trim either.

THANKFULLY John's dad came to help us paint the next morning and he was able to stand at the very top of the ladder and reach it!  Whew!

After priming the walls with the Fresh Start, we painted the walls Benjamin Moore's Shaker Beige.  As I mentioned before we used Benjamin Moore's colors in Behr Paint to get the best of both worlds!

We painted the walls first, then moved on to paint the baseboards, crown molding, 4 door facings off of the foyer, the inside of the front door, and two interior doors off the foyer-all of these were painted the Benjamin Moore's Dove White in Behr Paint.  

While we have so many shots of the carpet on the stairs, I'll take this time to mention that the day before we moved in the house we rented a big industrial carpet shampooer from Anderson Rentals.  John had to work that day, and I was definitely sore after lugging the big shampooer around the house!  It made such a big difference.  The carpets are in good condition, but just needed a good deep cleaning since the kids sit and lay on them all.the.time!

And then I started hanging a few things on the walls and decorating the foyer...

After the wallpaper was gone and we took down the ugly lacey curtains on the sidelights, we quickly realized that we needed some sort of window cover for the sidelights for privacy in the evenings.  

We found sidelight blinds to match the other blinds (that's another post) we had installed in the rest of the house.  We would have to remove 17 rungs from the bottom, but they were the perfect width!

This seemingly quick project of hanging two small blinds ended up being really involved because John had to drill into metal to hang them.  I measured and marked all the holes, but John had the hard part of drilling into the metal.  (Luckily he has a brand new drill and drill bits that the kids and I gave him for his birthday in September!)  John did great, but it wasn't an easy job.  After he got them hung I removed the unnecessary rungs from the bottom.

John and I are SO pleased with how it looks now!

close up

closed

closed

open!

open!

I was so excited to be able to hang pictures of the kids in the stairway!

Pictures hung!

And I placed a small lamp on the foyer table which provides just the right amount of light in the evenings!

off

on

The foyer and stairs look SO, SO different now!  And John and I are very pleased!  The foyer was a joint effort of us, John's Dad and my parents helping paint, and Nana watching the kids!

More blog posts on our updates coming soon as we continue MAKING OUR HOME from this house!