Hallway Ideas

I know the wall paper still isn't finished being removed, but I am getting super excited about what I can do with the upstairs hallway. I have been pinning ideas like crazy on Pinterest.

I would love to put up grass cloth wall paper and build a chair rail like the one in our living room like the picture below.

I love this style and really want to do it eventually, however it would be more expensive and time consuming. After spending all that time removing the wall paper it would be hard to put more up. But this is still in the running.

Another idea I had was to paint the hallway white and build lots of trim on it like the picture below

I think it adds a lot of character and would make the space feel really open. This would also be expensive and time consuming. Building just the bottom chair rail in the living took a lot of time and effort. However I think the molding would be worth the investment.

Finally, I was thinking about painting a light neutral color and putting really big art pieces along it like a gallery. Kinda like the picture below

We'll see what I decide!

The wall paper is finally coming down!

When we first saw the house I decided that the wall paper had to go. Below are some pictures of it in our stairwell and upstairs hallway.

It's definitely high end wall paper but it is so not my style. Also the colors are too dark against all of our wood trim. Even though I have disliked the wall paper from day one I have been dreading removing it. I knew it was going to be a pain so here we are two years later and we are still living with the wall paper.

This past fall I removed the border from our informal living room (the guy before us must have really liked borders and wall paper because he put them all over) shown in a post here. Removing this border was super easy so it gave me the confidence to finally tackle the hallway.

I am breaking up the wall paper removal into phases because there is so much of it. First I am starting with the hallway, then the little part at the bottom of the stairs and finally I will tackle the stairwell.

I bought "Chomp" wall paper removal spray that comes in a plastic spray bottle for the border removal so I just used what was left and followed the directions on the back. It says to slowly remove the top layer of the wall paper by peeling it back. Starting at the top right corner, I used my nails to lift the corner and pulled until the whole top of sheet of wall paper was unattached to the wall.

Then I continued to pull down firmly but gently until the whole sheet came off. In the picture above I am removing a small piece but the majority of the sheets came off in big (3 feet x 8 feet) sheets. Since I had such good luck with this step I began removing the top layer of wall paper in the whole hallway. When I was done it looked like this

It is already an improvement! The off white backing was still attached to the wall so that was the next step. I sprayed small sections of the backing with my spray wall paper remover until all of it was pretty moist and waited 1 to 3 minutes.

Then I used a putty knife to loosen the edge and began pulling off the backing.

Using the putty knife helped larger sheets come off, but this part definitely took a lot longer. Once I removed a section I wiped the walls down with a moist sponge. Also open a window when using this spray because the fumes are awful.

I did about 1/4 of the hallway when I ran out of spray so I have to wait to get some more. I think I will need at least 2 more bottles. I can't wait for it to be finished. The hallway already looks bigger and brighter!