The Back Hall Reveal Before and After

Besides a random peak here and there from reveals and projects of other parts of the house this is the very first time I’ve ever posted about our back hall! This hall, Lodi’s room, our Guest Bedroom, and even a bit of the workshop, used to be a wide open screened in porch. (Sorry for the before pics but they’re the best I have. Hopefully the before and after floor plan as well as the renovation pics help somewhat.) I designed this back hall during the renovation to be a “T” each wing going to a bedroom and, before we made Lodi’s room, to a hall and big closet and back door which was just wasted space until we started work on all of it.

The hall (along with the guest bedroom) sports an entire wall of 100 year old wood siding which I, of course, kept and simply repainted back to its original crisp white.

(It was awesome to find the original siding hiding under all that wood paneling! The screened in porch wasn’t added until ten years after the original home was built.)

The main wall color out here is called Rise and Shine by Clark Kensington. I brought the color in to flow right from the living room which I think works really well as its the room we walk through to get here.

With my choice of putting the new main floor bathroom location (see that reveal here) I opted to have the door open out back here for easy access to the two main floor bedrooms. (One bedroom which I converted into our workshop.) It gives it privacy from the rest of the house and is only a few steps to each room.

With the completion of Lodi’s own space and the gorgeous door we scored for it and the amount of work it took to get here I decided our back hall deserved its own post.

I love black doors which is awesome because almost every single one of the original doors in this house (which I reused along with their original hardware) had many layers of ancient oil based paint on them.

Could I have removed the paint?

Absolutely.

Would it have taken forever and a ton of paint stripper and an eternity of sanding?

Absolutely.

Not only that though that ancient oil based finish cracked in the COOLEST elephant skin way I have EVER seen and I didn’t even know it did that! So, opting to paint the doors out in black Rustoleum was a no brainer for me!

I absolutely love the contrast of the black doors, the buttery color on the walls and all of the white trim and character out here.

The old location of what once was the “outside” light I didn’t even try to hide. I left the old wires (not connected to anything of course) and ran new electric to the place the old light used to be and found what I thought was a cool old “lantern” for the our main light out here in our back hall.

The floors we painted Sooty Lashes by Valspar.

They’re the same color we painted the floors in Lodi’s room and in the guest bedroom for a number of reasons.

First, the reason I painted the floors initially during the renovation was because these are the original porch floors and they had already been painted many times. They weren’t in the best of the shape and having some painted wood floors felt like a fun way to change it up.

(The rest of the floors in the entire home are hardwoods I stained Dark Walnut.)

I used that color because I love it and I had it leftover from when I painted out our master suite.

Several years after the renovation the floors needed to be repainted but I still loved the color so we opted to just paint them out in Sooty Lashes again.

All in there are FIVE different entrances into this back hall but to me it has a traditional and cozy feel that I really like.

The soaring ceilings give it a lot of breathing room and I think our deciding to not go all the way up with Lodi’s wall adds some interest and breathing room. Of course the fact that we scored on the gorgeous door for Lodi’s room that also had a window in it really helped out here a lot too!

This hall could have been very dungeon-like most of the time without the light through his door coming in.

The rug I got for a steel off of Amazon and we totally love it! Check it out here.

The prints I did through vistaprint of the barn, the old farm yard and my grandparents.

Of all the spaces in the home this back hall I absolutely neglected the longest because, seriously, its a hall!

But I’m so glad to finally give it a makeover. It connects so many of our spaces and it feels wonderful to walk through here now!