Hallway / Step Down / Nook / Weird Space

When we first moved into our house I painted this area a deep, chocolate brown.  It was a nice contrast with our kitchen color.

Aw, new carpet.  How quickly you came to look dirty and disgusting!

It stayed like this for a couple of years and then I added a gallery of white frames.

Which didn't work out as nicely as I thought.  I was constantly straightening frames and a couple fell off the wall after some especially boisterous boy activity.  The carpet started looked dingy and dirty and the white doors reflected the brown paint and then with the new dark floors I was just over the darkness of the whole space.  I needed color.   So I painted orange and white stripes.

This is such an awkward space to take pictures of.  I promise that it doesn't look like a crazy circus house in real life.

I love, love, love the orange stripes.  They are a soft orange, like cantaloupe or dreamsicles.   That ugly light fixture has got to go.  I'm just not sure what I want to replace it with yet.

I would really love to replace all the doors and doorknobs in our house.  Just saving money for that.  It's actually not too expensive of a project, although I know I will need help hanging the new doors.   We're also going to add trim all the away around the entrance to this little step down area.  It's hard to explain in these pictures.

Above is the door to the master bedroom.  To the left of the stripes is the laundry room.  So the trim would go on that corner there both on the stripey side and on the blue/green side where the laundry room is.  And then across the top because the ceiling is lower in the step down area.

And same thing for this side.  Trim on the stripey side and then trim on the kitchen wall and going across the top to make kind of a V-shaped doorway.  I'll show you when it's all done.   In the above picture the door leads to the craft room.  Also, you can see how I've added white switch plate covers but the switch and outlets are still almond.  Classy.   Those will all get changed out, too.

And now for the ugly part.  I ripped up the dirty carpet.

I'm going to continue the kitchen/laundry room floor down these steps and to the doors.  But first I have to fill all those holes in the concrete.  And I'm debating over whether to pour self leveling concrete and then lay the new floors over that.   Or to just put down a new wood sub-floor over the concrete and then put the new planks on that.  They both have pros and cons.

I'm thinking that the wood will go on the floor and the steps and I'll paint the risers white.  Oh yeah, I need to attach wood risers to the front of these concrete steps.

Tricky, tricky.  But it's going to look awesome when it's done!

So here's the plan of attack.

• Figure out the sub-floor.
• Lay new flooring.
• Install trim.
• Install new baseboards (throughout the whole house, except bedrooms)
• Replace doors and doorknobs
• Replace almond switches and outlets with white ones
• Replace ugly boob light with beautiful light that I haven't found yet.

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, right?