The Hallway Remodel

The hallway was extremely dated when I moved in. It had pretty bad paneling on the walls, and really old pineapple looking lights on the ceiling. It was always pretty dark up there, as there were only two lights total. The only switch for the lights was down the stairs om the level below the upstairs, in the living room area. Lastly, the ceiling paint was peeling pretty bad in front of the bathroom doorway, due to humidity.

As you can see, it wasn't very pretty!
The first thing I did was gut the whole thing. All the paneling came down, the base trim and casement came out, the handrail was removed, as was the board across from the handrail, and the lights were taken out.

Originally the hallway had three doors for the bedrooms, one door for the guest bathroom, and an opening into a good sized craft room (which is now the master bathroom).

I closed off the opening to the craft room. The new entrance to that room was the door I added in the master bedroom (see the master bedroom blog post for details on that).

I added a door for the hall closet. Previously there were two closets in one of the side bedrooms. I closed that door off in the bedroom, and made into a hall closet. This required the moving of the central vacuum line. It previously ran under the floor in the hallway, and came out on the wall right where the new door needed to be added. You can see a pic of it above on the left. I moved it by opening up the ceiling downstairs in the living room, cutting down the pipes and wires, and rerouting them up through the new wall that I added when I closed off the craft room.

The paneling left the walls in a huge mess, due to the extreme amounts of construction adhesive that was on there. I cleaned all that up by mudding and sanding it all smooth. Way back in the 80s before the paneling went up, the owners had let their children marker all over the walls. There were drawings, names, and all kinds of things written on the walls. It was an interesting find, but it did make it so that I had to do four coats of wall primer and three coats of paint over it to get it to stop bleeding through.

The light switch problem was solved by adding another switch in front of the door to the master bedroom, which is at the end of the hallway.

To solve the light problem, I used can lights. I replaced the existing two lights with can lights, and I added a third in the middle of the hallway. This made such a huge difference for brightening, and making the space look much more modern.

Much like I did in the other interior rooms, I textured the walls and ceiling with a heavy knock down texture.

The finished result looks really great.

The doorway into the guest bath still needs casement and a door replacement at this point. That's the next room I'll be working on.

The ceiling was primed twice with wall primer, then given two coats of gloss interior latex paint, to prevent peeling issues in the future.

That's it for now. Next up, I'll show the finished master bathroom, which to this point is definitely my masterpiece on this house!