In My Part 1 Post of the Hallway renovation, I left off in the fall of 2011, after we had demoed the hallway and added a door to the bedroom. Then we Painted the Stairs. But after most of the demo work in the hallway was done, we had to begin rebuilding, restructuring, and problem solving - because we had lots more work to do.
With most old houses, there are going to be structural issues, and our hallway was no exception. As I've mentioned before, one of the many problems in the renovation process with this house always lies with the foundation, which needs to be partly rebuilt. The broken foundation makes some parts of our house literally not level. The unevenness in the hallway was something we had to work around as we went. Example: When cutting drywall, do we cut it "actual level," or "house level"? Most of the time, we just had to go with what looked right to us.
As you might remember, we tore out the wall that made up the back of a closet in the next room:
By the end of 2011, Trent had framed the new hall closet and wall, and installed the closet door:
The next step was electrical. In early 2012, Trent installed 4 new lights in the hallway (There were 0 working lights in there before):
- 1 light inside the closet, with a corresponding on/off switch on the wall.
- 2 recessed lights in the ceiling with a corresponding dimmer switch on the wall.
- 1 main hallway light in the tall part of the hallway (by the bedroom and bathroom), and a corresponding switch on the wall.
Here's the closet light - for the fixture, we just used a light we already had on hand:
You can see the ceiling in the closet is slanted. We did this to make full use of all of the closet space, since it is a very small space. We figured, why not use all of the possible space we have to work with?
These are the two recessed lights we installed on the ceiling. (We started putting drywall up, too):
And here you can see two of the light switches we installed:
The one on the right is the dimmer switch for the recessed lights. The left one next to the closet door is the on/off switch for the closet light. We use them all the time and are really happy with the placement and everything so far.
Here's the final light - In the tall, squarish portion of the ceiling, at the end of the hallway:
Here's the final light - In the tall, squarish portion of the ceiling, at the end of the hallway:
You can see that we also started putting in insulation up there, and Trent did some extra framing work and fixed the leaking problem, too. It's partially because of all these little extra details and complications that this hallway has been such a project!
Even picking out a light fixture proved to be more difficult than we expected. This is actually the light we had originally picked out for the hallway:
See how it hangs in front of the door that would become the new bathroom door? We ended up taking it back to the store, because even though we really liked the look of it, it just hung down too far and didn't look right in the space.
We chose this one instead because it looked modern, and it was flush to the ceiling:
Just look at that glow :) We got the light from Lowe's and really like it so far. It looks even better with actual drywall on the ceiling, as you might imagine. I'll hopefully have pictures of the finished product soon!
After the lighting, we had another small project:
Ya know that door that had been leaning against the wall at the end of the hallway? Well, that would become the new door to the bathroom. As I said before, the only entrance to the ONLY bathroom in our house was through the bedroom, which made it a little awkward for guests. So we wanted to move the door to the end of the hallway, which naturally makes sense, don't you think?
Stay tuned for a post all about this tomorrow! I'm all hallway-ed out today! :)
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