Upstairs Hallway Renovation

After last year's living room renovation, Hubby made it quite clear that this year we were NOT going to do any renovating.  At least, HE was not going to do any renovating.  I, on the other hand, like to have a project to do in the winter after the holidays.  So I decided to renovate the upstairs hallway - by myself, with no help from Hubby.

My main motivation for doing so was the fact that there were holes in the wall at the top of the stairs, presumably from people moving furniture not very carefully:

There were two of them, this being the larger one.  Instead of going through all the work of cutting out the pieces of sheet rock and replacing it, taping it, mudding it and sanding it, we found mesh repair thingys at Home Cheapo:

You still have to mud it and sand it, but it's much easier.  The bigger hole was a bit too big for this method, and I ended out with a "divot" on that wall.

I also had to repair the little bit of wall between our bedroom and my craft room. When I pulled the broken sheet rock away, I saw that the original corner went way deep in.

I thought about taking the sheet rock right off and leaving it with the deep corner, then decided there was no need to do that, so I repaired it.

Then the big question was whether to pull down the wallpaper or paint over it.  I tried pulling down some paper, but there was a coating of paint underneath that came off along with the paper, as well as some of the covering on the sheet rock.

Not very pretty, and I was going to have to do a "skim coat" of mud over the whole wall to cover all the mess.  I decided to go a different route and try something I'd never done before.  Texture paint.  

I read online that if the paint is water-based, it could moisten the wallpaper and make bubbles, etc.  So I painted over the wall paper with Kilz first.   Then I spent one day when I was home "sick" painting all the woodwork and the ceiling..........two coats!

Finally I did two coats of texture paint.  It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be and it came out pretty nice.  It covers a lot of the sins!

I was hoping I'd be able to tint the texture paint whatever color I wanted, but apparently you have to do the texture paint, then paint with regular latex paint....two coats!

So now I was into it for 5 coats.....1 coat of Kilz, two coats of texture, and two coats of colored paint!

In deciding a paint color, I was going to go with a gray/blue color thinking I would get a flooring that looked like slate.  But the flooring I wanted only had wood tones, so I decided to go with orange.  (I'd read that orange was a good color for an entryway because it's warm and inviting.)

Now my hallway looked like this:

As you can see, the walls look great but the flooring looks horrible!  You can't see it too well in this photo, but it's gray tile supposedly looking like rocks - all broken - and it was put down with tile cement.   My first thought was to go over it with flooring, but it was so broken and there were some spots where it was lifting up, that I let Hubby talk me into ripping up the tile.   And he volunteered to do it!   Thank goodness, because I hate demo!  It only took him an hour or so.

I knew flooring would be a problem because I couldn't take the moldings off - they are wide, old-fashioned moldings basically imbedded in the walls.   So I searched around and found "Allure" flooring.  It is vinyl, made to look like wood, flexible, and you can cut it with a box knife.  It's a "floating floor" so you connect each piece to the next instead of gluing it to the floor.

What a bastard that flooring turned out to be!!  I ruined the first piece trying to cut around the doorways, which made me very nervous because it was kind of expensive!  And I was worried about not having enough pieces and having to buy another whole box because I'd ruined a piece or two!  

But all's well that ends well.  It took me about 8 hours total, but I got that damn floor down! And I squeaked by with just enough pieces!  I can see every single mistake I made, but if you don't look too closely, it doesn't look half bad!

I varnished the thresholds tonight and went around and fixed all the little boo-boos in the painting.  The only thing left to do is put the edging at the top of the stairs.

All in all I'm happy with the way it came out.  It's certainly cleaner and prettier than it was before!!

Of course, that just makes the downstairs hallway look worse!!