Every house has its story. What's yours?

Following the renovation the living room we had some extra boards and paint plus with all of the tools still upstairs we decided to go ahead with giving the hallway a facelift. Initially we though a new coat of paint would do the trick, but we had one of our usual conversations that tend to result in more work. This time we came to the conclusion that it could be nice to do some of the corner frame moulding like we did in the living room but with thinner boards as the hallway is much smaller. Also we wanted to see what one of the timber walls looked like and if we could expose it in some nice way.

I began by cutting away the areas where the wallpaper overlapped and spackled them over. I also began putting the ceiling and corner mouldings up (I used pieces I had leftover from the ceiling work in the livingroom). Destruction of the wall covering the timber wall commenced soon thereafter with these results:

As you can see from above pics (for some reason we always have a fuzzy one...Grrr!) the timber wall was in surprisingly good shape. I jumped to work on the logs. The original builders of the house used a combination of flax, straw and old fishing nets to stuff into the joints of the logs. I removed those where I could and began a long sanding process. After that I scrounged around for some boards I could cut to fit into some of the larger gaps and wood-glued them in.

Next the issue of what to do around the entrance to the living room. We decided to build simple box-like frame around it to hide the wires that were there as well as the different stages of doorways that had been put in and taken out over the years. Finally it was time for the dreaded spackling/caulking of the joints, gaps and cracks between the logs as well as where they met the stairs, wall and the living room entrance.

Next the ceiling needed attention so I spackled/caulked it before prep and paint. We then painted the timber wall as well as all the mouldings (floor, doors, window, corners and ceiling) and remaining walls. We had painted everything white, but it lacked a 'pop' so the wife had the idea that since we had some of the warm gray left from what we had used in the living room we could mix that with the remaining white for a softer warm gray and I was up for anything other than white. It turned out to be exactly what we had wanted, but didn't know we had wanted.

Finally came the painting of the stairway to the attic along with dark grey tile I had used in the adjoining bathroom.

All in all we are pleased to plesent yet another room:

Not too shabby, we think.