From Beige to Bright: Our Entry Hall and Stairs

As you may remember from this post, I wanted to make our entry hall and stairs less, well, boring.  It was so beige.  Blah. Yawn. Boorrrrring.  Here is a picture of what it looked like before:

It just screams “blah.”

Here’s what it looks like now:

Whaddaya think?  It is so much brighter…much more welcoming when you come in the house.

So, what did I do?

First, I painted the walls bright white.  I used Benjamin Moore, Pearl Finish, White.  The walls are actually wood paneling under there (blech), so I treated it like wainscoting.   I painted the stair risers the same color, once I took the carpet off the stairs.

Ah, the carpet.

Originally, I was not planning to take the carpet off the stairs.  But then I noticed how easily it came up in some places, and how it was totally not attached on the top landing, and I thought, “Hey, why not?  How hard could it be?”

Famous last words.

First of all, I have never seen so many staples holding down anything in my whole life. There were parts of the carpet coming up, so those were easy to remove.  But other parts literally had to be removed with a pry bar.  No, I’m not kidding.

These are the tools I used to pull up the carpet and the ONE MILLION staples holding it to the stairs (in addition to the pry bar):

Lemme tell ya – these are a carpet-pulling-up girl’s best friend.  The most helpful of the three was the pliers on the right, called “cutting pliers,” I think. I call them rock ‘n roll pliers, because they grab the staples and you can rock them back and forth using the rounded head to get them out.  They rock! (Ha! Carpet humor.)

Second, the carpet was FILTHY.  Really, really dirty and gross.  Every time I pulled the carpet off a stair, I vacuumed, because there was so much dust and dirt.  I sneezed through the whole process.  Buy stock in Benadryl now, people, cuz we all needed a lot of it with this project and the associated dust!

Should I have removed the carpet first and then painted?  Why, yes. Of course.  But the problem was that I didn’t really think I was going to remove the carpet until after I painted and saw how dingy it looked next to the bright walls.

After removing the carpet and doing a significant amount of clean up, I finished painting the risers, touching up the walls, and painting the trim.

Then I hung up some art.  From left to right, the first painting is of the Dog Who Doesn’t Eat Pizza, Bear.  My brother gave that to me for Christmas one year, and it was painted by a local artist.  Above it is a painted plaque from the Scott Antiques Market that says “Wag More.  Bark Less.”  Amen to that.

In the above picture, you can also see the banister hardware, which I spray painted Oil Rubbed Bronze (Rustoleum spray paint).  I’m going to do the same thing to the coat closet hardware and front door hardware, too.

Next is a graphic I ordered from Zazzle.com.  It’s all the important dates in our family’s lives.  I love it because it just looks like a bunch of numbers, but we know the significance of them.  Plus, you know I have a thing for typography and numbers, right?