Countdown to Move In: Front Foyer

As I mentioned in my previous post, we took possession of this house on New Years Eve... and we subletted our townhouse for Feb 1 (they ended up moving on Jan 23), so we had 3 weeks of overlap to get the new place live-able before the big move.

I also had a job offer to start Jan 23, and I am insane so I planned my twins' birthday party to take place in our basement the following weekend, so we really had to use these three weeks to get things done.

Luckily Ben was able to work from home and he dedicated his evenings to working on the place.

We decided the priority projects were flooring.... so much easier to do with none of our stuff in the house.

But, in true "if you give a mouse a cookie" style, we decided we'd better paint/remove wallpaper before starting any flooring projects. Oy vey.

First thing we really tackled was the front Foyer wallpaper. The Foyer used to be the third bedroom. When they added the second floor they moved the front door over to where the window for this bedroom was, expanded the livingroom and built the staircase (and the front hall under it- which goes all the way under the stairs, great for xmas tree storage). There is still wallpaper from the previous bedroom in the closet! (and there was even an outlet, we had the electrians remove it though).

I wish I had a better before picture, but this will have to give an idea for now:

After scraping the paper it looked something like this:

Much better, but as you can see I still have green wool carpet and purple underpad glued to the stairs.

I'll get more into this whole carper scraping/hardwood finishing fiasco in a future post, but you can get a preview here of the hardwood refinishing project.

Here is a progress shot:

We basically left it at that until after move in. A few weeks ago I finally got the motivation to get the walls primed and painted.

I went with colours I already had- yellow squash (we got 5gallons of it... we used it for the panelling downstairs) and hedgehog brown for an accent wall (benjamin moore colours).

Here is the Foyer all primed...

And here is the final project. We also changed out the vintage light switches, removed a retro thermostat and doorbell chime.

The natural hardwood in the foyer will eventually be replaced when we re-do the adjacent kitchen, so I don't mind that it clashes with our refinished dark hardwood. :) We also want to re-do the railing, but that's a project on the B list for now.

Looks pretty good... at least when it's not piled with boots coats and backpacks belonging to the 5 kids!