Hallway

Please bear with me as I try to describe makeovers that happened a while ago. I'm trying to get this ol' blog up-to-date so everyone can be caught up. Hopefully at some point, this will be a blog that is a play by play of our every day activities. I apologize if some of my readers have seen these pics before, but I'm going to attempt at catching everyone up to speed.  So here is our hallway makeover.

When we first did our house tour, I tried to snap pics of everything. Here was how our hallway looked. It had parquet flooring and off white walls.

During the first few years it looked like this. We added several big photo frames and all of the frames were black. Apparently we also kept our hamper at the end of the hallway for all to see. I also remember we used to keep our big black metal coat rack at the end of the hallway too. However that went up into the attic when our first child pulled it over. First time parent rookie mistake.

A hallway is pretty easy to paint, since there is no furniture against the walls, so one day I decided to paint it with Olympic's NO VOC interior latex paint in "thin ice." It's a sort of light gray.  We also replaced the flooring in the hallway with Lumber Liquidator's laminate in a light color to match the boy's room and the dining room.  More on that makeover later. The rug was purchased at Overstock and we love that it keeps our feet warm in the winter and also helps protect the floor when the attic ladder comes down.

Most recently I gathered some old frames we had in the attic and some around the house and turned one of the walls in the hallway into a gallery of pictures. Some frames include photos, some original art by the kids, and other framed pieces are just things we like to look at. Here is looking down the hallway:

This is the other end of the hallway. You can see a pic of the two boys in the left hand corner and our wedding photo below that. That black and white girl is my grandmother when she was young.

These are some close-ups of the things we framed. Here our sweet little MVP in his cloth diaper at age 3 months or so. He was a big boy! 10 pounds, 11 ounces!

My Mom framed this one for us. It's a section of stores where Joe's Grandfather J. Winfield Pearson owned a bicycle shop in Oakland California.

My oldest son CAP made this in Kindergarten this year. It's a charcoal drawing of an elephant. I just love it.

This frame already had the clover print in it, but I liked it to much I added my own little cut out of a quote that I really like "Mother's hold their children's hands for a short while, their hearts forever."

Here is a close up of my Grandma when she was a child. I just love how stylish she looks with her wool hat, those cute bangs and that jacket. People ask me if it's a photo of a movie star. Nope, just my Grandma. She was very stylish her entire life.

We kept this Pottery Barn frame up but switched out the old wedding photos for some that included our three children. The top photo is Joe and I circa 1998. The middle four pics include at least one shot of each child and the bottom photo is a family pic from May 2011.

In this collage at the very end of our hallway, I framed each child in black and white during their first Christmas. I kind of wish they all wore the same outfit, but I couldn't find the matching socks to CAP's pajamas, so they each wore their Christmas best.

This little frame includes Joe's Grandpa Carlin, his cousin Mary Beth, Uncle Jimmy, Grandma Toot and Joe all the way to the right with the very blond hair. Look at those long legs!

Just a reminder of what our hallway looked like in the beginning:

And here is our hallway as it looks today. We love all the white frames and how they can easily be changed to add things we like or to update the children's art or their current pics.

Hope you enjoyed this little peek into our Hallway. :)

xo
Cathleen