Painting the Hallway and Hanging Wedding Photos

Next up on the painting to-do list was the

upstairs stairwell / hallway.

I couldn't find any good 'before' pictures for the hallway painting, so they must have been included in the pics
I lost when my computer died.  :(

However, the lack of 'before' pictures isn't 
really a major loss since the hallway area was pretty lame
(seen here in my Replacing Grossness with Lovely Carpet! post). 
It was pretty dirty and painted some routine (boring) version of off white, which you can see in this picture of this ugly pine dresser adorned by the lovely Bear Bear!

We painted this dresser - I will be posting on that soon too, but you can see a sneak peak of the finished product below!

While painting is no amazing feat, I am consistently

impressed with how much, and how quickly, it changes an area.  And of all the painting we have done in the house, 
I think I like the hallway color we chose the best.  
It's a soft and creamy taupe... and makes me feel like our hallway is a serene coffee shop. :) I really like the way it coordinates with the carpet too!

After painting, we were finally inspired to hang this super cute set of picture frames that we got at Pier 1. We purchased these frames with a gift card we received from our friends Jamie and Michelle at our engagement party. We absolutely love the antiqued window pane style,  they are perfect for an old farmhouse!
(I have to admit that the frames sat hung on the wall empty for several months, but we finally got some wedding pics in them!)

Replacing Grossness with Lovely Carpet!

When we moved into our house, there were definitely some areas that seemed *very* questionable.  Things that were so ... unattractively highlighted in the real estate advertisements that we almost didn't look at the house.  Seriously.  

One such area was the 2nd floor stairwell landing/hallway.  As you can see below, the original wood flooring sustained some serious damage at some point in the farmhouse's history.  

My beloved Poco examines the terrible flooring.  
Unfortunately, Poco passed after 16 years with me in Oct 2012.  <3

A portion of the floor was nearly black - I'm assuming some sort of water damage since the floor is right next to the bathroom, though in all honesty I have no idea what happened. Clearly large portions of the floor had been removed and replaced - with newer hardwoods and straight up plywood.  Needless to say, both solutions looked hideous! Hehe. I googled our address and I actually found the realtor pictures from 2008, when the previous owner bought the house from the owners that preceded her.  In those photos, the entire upstairs was carpeted (and it looked WAY better), so we figured out that the lady before us must have ripped out the carpet in an effort to get to the original hardwoods below, but found THIS.  

There's a similar makeshift flooring solution in our 2nd bedroom...
part of me really wants to take up the floor and see if
there's buried treasure under these wacko floorboards!

It's not terribly terribly obvious in the photos, but there's also a full step - at least 3-4 inches - between our hallway and the bathroom... while we couldn't really address that with carpet, I DO hope to eradicate that with the upcoming main bath renovation!  (Woot! Stay tuned for that!)  Our hallway also had a huge slope - this 100+ year old house has settled, and the flooring reflected that.  It kind of made me seasick.  

Naturally, we needed a fix.  Since the hall is upstairs where the bedrooms are, we opted to go to with carpeting.  We chose a luxurious Stainmaster carpet from Lowe's. It was definitely one of their more expensive carpets (at least within the Lowe's selection), but it was so worth it - it feels like heaven underneath the feet!  We chose the 'Capri Place Comic Plush' carpeting, and it was lovely!

As the name says, it's really plush, and the only downside is that footprints are very visible, as you can see!

We didn't overtly address the sloping, but after carpet padding and carpet, the slope virtually disappeared.  It still exists, but its barely noticeable now. 

At the time, we only carpeted the hallway and not the bedrooms - only because carpeting is pretty absurdly expensive.  We did, however, take a runner down the stairs to prevent falls for us and our 4 legged friends.  Safety first!

The carpet looks way browner here.
I guess it's the lighting.

We're actually about to install carpeting in two of our upstairs bedrooms, but not our master yet, mainly because its an extra 1k just to carpet one room, and the original wood flooring in the master is actually pretty nice.  I'm excited to get that done and start making some of the other bedrooms nice, instead of random receptacles of storage. :)