Entryway Reno

Rumour has it that in order to have an effective before/after renovation post one must have before photos. I fail. I have no idea how it happened but either I forgot to take before photos or I somehow lost them when the laptop crashed. I am fairly certain I didn’t take any because I know I had all my files backed up. I guess when I took the initial before photos of the house when we took possession the entry way was the last thing on my radar and then when he started working away at it, I didn’t realize there weren’t any. Which stinks. Because it would be nice to show you just how far this space has come.

So will you just trust me on it? That the walls were crumbling and falling apart and that there was a large, open hole that went straight to the concrete floor of the basement? Um, yeah. No joke. Most people would have assumed it was meant to be a laundry chute but considering the house didn’t have any laundry hookups when we moved in (again, no joke) I’m not entirely sure what the purpose was. Except to pose an extreme danger to young children. When we moved in, the “hole” was quickly covered with a piece of plywood until Evan got the space finished.

This photo of our hallway is the only one I have that shows any amount of the before of the entry way. You can just barely see the door to the garage and the hole on the bottom right that was covered by a lovely turquoise curtain.

Anyhow, use your imagination. It was bad. Really bad.

This is the space that comes in from the garage. It’s our primary entrance and because there is no (functional) closet space in this area of the house, we needed to make it more useful for our needs. Eventually we’d like to have the garage at a state where we can put coats/shoes but even in the winter, this is no good because who wants to put freezing cold boots on when they go outside? We have a front door and front closet where we store most of the shoes/coats/hats/mitts but we like to avoid using this entrance, especially in the winter to avoid tracking dirt into the dining room.

This is how the space looks today. Evan replaced the floor, fixed the walls, put white paneling on the bottom half of the walls to even them out and painted the upper portion the same colour as the rest of the hallway and bathroom. He painted the existing door white. He added hooks for coats and transformed the elusive hole to the basement into a permanent shoe storage cubby. It’s perfect for keeping shoes out of the way – and accessible enough that we don’t end up leaving them tossed all over the floor when we come in.

  

On the opposite wall of the coat hooks is the door to the basement and this high (not very functional) closet. I need a ladder – not just a chair – a ladder to get to it. So for now, with a huge unfinished basement for storage, it sits empty. It doesn’t even seem to make sense to put seasonal things in there. Much easier to store them downstairs. Maybe someday I’ll find a use for it.

Because the door to the basement swings into the entry way, there wasn’t enough room to make the coat shelf big enough to have baskets for hats/mitts/scarves and so on. So for now, a few of them are tossed around but most of them are still either in the bench in the hallway or in the front closet. Scarves and kid gloves that are on a string can hang on the hooks. Not the most ideal situation, but I haven’t yet thought of something better.

I try to keep most of our outdoor apparel hanging in the closet in the dining room and reserve this space for our most used stuff so it doesn’t get to jam packed but already it seems that it is becoming the catch all area.

The space still needs a bit of work. The door is painted (and looks 100% better than it did before) but eventually I’d love to see it replaced. The photos in the frame of the key holder need to be updated. And I may need to find something for the wall above the shoe box or maybe some kind of sign above the door. I’m not sure about this yet. It is a small, busy, potentially clutter filled area so I may just want to leave that wall bare to cut down on the craziness of this area of the house. Any suggestions?