Calvin Hallway beautification

When I was scanning my old blog for my Funky Loser story, I noticed another old post with a photo of our hallway before we fixed it totally. I never posted an updated photo and cousin Sarah's house progress photos inspired me to finally show the finished product of some of our toils (Sarah, I'm looking forward to more of your photos!). Also, JB has been working his butt off on windows, and he sometimes forgets how far we've already come. It's hard to appreciate your work unless you see a good Before and After.

Here is the hallway before we bought the house and the correlating improvement. Not only did we paint, etc., but we cleaned the window. Apparently the previous homeowners did not own Windex, as NONE of the windows were cleaned. They were FILTHY. I found proof that the storms had not been washed since before 1972!! This window was one of the cleanest ones, though if you look closely, you will see paint all around the edge of it, because scraping paint was too much work for them.:






















Here is the other end of the hall. We had refinished the floors, painted the walls and ceiling, and rewired the light by then, but the trim still needed help:























Now, sure, it looks good. But the casual eye will not understand the insane work that went into this, unless you've owned your own vintage fixer upper. Such as listening to previous owner's whispers in the air as you work:

"Hmm...this door really needs to be painted. But sanding, washing, priming, and REMOVING THE HARDWARE is too much work. Let's just slop paint everywhere and call it good. Let's not even bother to TRY to remove some of the mis-slopped paint. Oh, and washing the door when it gets dirty? Who do you think I am? A CLEAN person?"
























JB spent hours cleaning all the hinges on all the doors. We trashed the cheap knobs (I believe that the originals were pawned) and scored vintage replacement knobs off of eBay. I heart eBay.























This is an example of how we spend our free time. Yes, we are crazy. JB has a load of more projects like this lined up, so if we don't post for a while, you'll understand. We're busy out buying more Windex.