Hallways

This is the hallway that runs right through the center of my little house:

It leads from the living room, where you enter the front door (there is no proper entryway area in this layout), and passes 2 hallway closets, the full bath, and each of the three bedrooms. At its end is a linen closet.

I suppose in this picture it really doesn't even look that bad, but let me tell you- this little hallway is narrow and dark. And the smelly cat pee carpet doesn't help things.

Oh yeah, and those two closets I mentioned?


Well, the one you can see in the front left of that photo doesn't exist any more. We removed it to make the cramped little bathroom (the only full bathroom in the house) a bit roomier. Now you can sit on the toilet without your knees touching a wall! Yay!

So that is one of the two closets in this hall. The other closet is directly across from the one we removed. I don't have any great pictures of the before, but you can see it on the right in the picture below:

This other closet has a story. From first glance this little coat closet seems too small for just about anything besides a couple of coats. But it is actually the floor of the closet that is important. That is where the trap door is, leading down the crawlspace under the house where the furnace is. We have taken to calling this space the hostage pit, for obvious reasons.

Here is a photo I snapped during our walk-through, when Evan, brave as ever, went to explore the hostage pit to see what we could learn about the foundation from inside there:

When I first viewed the house, this little closet that concealed entry to the pit didn't look so pretty. Its trim and door had been hastily removed, leaving the surrounding plaster pretty ripped up, and the door frame exposed. You can kind of see that in the picture of the hallway, above.

This must have happened when the furnace was stolen. Oh, did you not know that part? Yeah, in vacant homes anything of value is likely to get stolen. Including a whole giant furnace in a pit, apparently. I had heard of all kinds of things being stolen from vacant houses- copper wires from the wall? Sure. But a giant furnace that lives in a closed off pit under the house?

My neighbors speculate it was probably an inside job, which makes sense. Who would know to look for a trap door in the hallway closet in order to access a recently replaced, high efficiency furnace? Given the overall condition of the house, who would have even guessed the furnace down there was newer and of value, nevermind where it was located?

I actually keep thinking about this and really hope it was a close friend or family member of the former owner. She was an elderly woman who lived here alone, and due to taking out a reverse mortgage on her house to help support herself in her age, when she died the house went back to the bank- after owning her home for 50 years she was not able to leave it to a family member. So I like to imagine that stealing the furnace was the way a relative of hers may have been able to inherit something of hers after all, and get one over on the bank. But I have no facts to substantiate that theory, and it could just as well have been a contractor who had worked in the house before, or anyone else with knowledge of the brand new furnace and where it was located.


Anyways... back to that little doorway in the hall:

I opted not to replace the trim and door to this little closet, and just went with patching and cleaning up the plasterwork (with help from my dad, a master plaster-er!) and then hung a little curtain on a tension rod. I actually used the same geometric curtain panel that has hung in lieu of a closet door in both of my last apartments- I guess I'm not a big fan of real doors on closets? If your curious you can see it in this photo of my bedroom in my first home in portland, and this one of my last apartment!

The rest of the evolution of this hallway space involved removing the cat pee carpets (If you missed the post, you can read about that here!), cleaning, priming and painting the ceiling & walls, using layer after layer of wood putty to fill in the deep cat scratches in the wood trim, then priming and painting it gloss white,

And replacing the glass globe from that ceiling fixture, which was missing when we moved in.

I found the globe for the fixture at the rebuilding center. For such a simple thing, a globe with the right size opening turned out to be pretty hard to find! I could have replaced the entire fixture fairly easily, but I'm definitely trying to be mindful of money right now. The globe itself only cost me $2, way less money than a new light fixture. I still intend to try and clean up the fixture base a little (it has some paint on it that either could be removed with latex paint remover and elbow grease, or I could go ahead and give it an even coat of white paint to look purposeful.

Then came hanging art. You may recognize this assortment of framed prints from the entryway in my last apartment. Most of these things I've been collecting over time, and they've appeared in most of my living spaces over the years. As per my usual method, I figured out what to hang where by arranging all the pieces on the floor, stepping back and staring at them, and then tweaking them until the spacing and arrangement looked right. Menino helped.

And finally...the last project in the hallway- the big linen closet doors. I started out with priming them and painting them white for a clean bright affect. But then I talked myself in to going even farther. I think I will just let the before and afters speak for themselves.

Flamingo doors were an obvious choice, amiright?

So that is the evolution of the skinny, dark little hallway in my home.  I don't think I've ever devoted this many written words to the subject of a hallway. Turns out there is just so much to ramble about, huh? Do any of you constantly replace closet doors with curtain panels? Employ a rabbit to help you make art hanging decisions?  And one last question, because I'm just dying to know: have any of you heard of a stolen furnace before??