I hope you enjoyed having a look at our living room last weekend and as promised I want to show you the hallway today more than anything to gee me up to get this space looking and feeling a bit more finished and homely as it feels neither of those things right now.

I absolutely adore the colour that I chose for the hallway, which is Inchyra Blue by Farrow & Ball (they kindly gifted us just the paint for the hallway – not the rest of the house) and I love how it emphasises the beautiful original banisters and I chose to install a dado rail, not original to the house, to add even more of the colour (as well as hide mucky hand prints and dog scuffs). I also love the original internal doors that I chose to leave natural and I think the tone of the wood works really well with the blue (actually more green in this space).

However, the stairs are waiting for a carpet that may be a long time coming as it is SO expensive to carpet stairs and this makes the hallway feel and look very unfinished so I think we will paint them in the meantime (probably Railings, the same colour as our kitchen). Another problem is that we have a lot of shoes and boots to contend with so we are desperate for some storage as all we currently have are some hastily mounted pegs and a shelf from the old flat that don’t look great.  A lovely 1930s bevelled mirror and maybe a rug like this one and we’ll all be feeling much better about the space, I’m sure. In the meantime I’m going to show you some storage pieces from the Wooden Furniture Store that would work well in a hallway as they are kindly sponsoring this post.

Before and after

Just to give you an idea of what the hallway was like when we bought the house and how it looks today…

The hallway was very, very tired with peeling wallpaper, a horribly dirty green carpet, the woodwork was chipped and battered, the walls were filthy, the plaster was shot and the doors were painted. We completely stripped the place back to brick, replastered, re-wired with spot lights (which I HATE but we’ll talk about that another time) and re-plumbed and installed a new traditional style radiator that we painted the same colour as the walls. We had the picture rail, architrave, skirting and coving replaced as it was but I also added a dado rail, which I love for the style and practical benefits. The doors were dipped and left natural on this side (they’re painted on the other side in the living room) and I bought new handles.

My greatest sadness when we bought the house was that the previous owner had taken out the original front door. All of the other period features in the house were left alone and I was fine with the fact that that windows are uPVC but the front door makes me weep. However, as it is purely aesthetic it got pushed to the bottom of the list when it came to how we spent our renovation budget.

Future plans

This is the only storage we have as it stands – just a cheap peg rail and wall shelf that we brought from our flat and nothing for shoes and boots.

We will be carpeting the stairs in this sisal, which from previous experience is amazingly hard wearing and does not show up the dirt and wear like wool carpets can. We will also replace the front door and its frame with an original 1930s one like this, which will totally transform the feeling of the space as well as letting in more day light. For now though we are going to focus on less expensive and more practical pursuits like figuring out the storage, which I know will make this hallway a very useable and useful space.

Taking inspiration from the hallway furniture at Wooden Furniture Store, I am thinking of a storage bench that we will be able to sit on as well as storing shoes and boots. The other option is a dedicated shoe cupboard, which we may be able to fit alongside a bench as very soon Mimi’s buggy won’t be needed (sob!) so we will have extra space and she will no doubt have more shoes.

I really like having a wall mounted set of cubby holes that can be used to store mail, keys, dog leads etc. Even though this wall shelf with pegs isn’t intended for the hallway it would be perfect or a more conventional wall mounted set of coat hooks is very useful, especially if it has a shelf above.

Wall shelf with pegs

I had ruled out a console table as I had in my mind that it wouldn’t enough storage for us but looking at this one it could work for shoes below and then all those bits that just need to be shut away in a drawer and forgotten about 😉

Console table

We will also be painting and organising the under stairs cupboards as our next job so watch this space for progress on that (our weekends are soooo fun at the moment!).

During

And just to give you an idea of what was involved in getting smooth walls, restored doors, a new radiator and re-wired lights in our hallway here are the ‘during’ pics…

So, there you are. If anyone has an extra couple of thousand pounds floating around fling them my way for some carpet and a new front door – ha!

Katy x

*This post was kindly sponsored by the Wooden Furniture Store.

Right. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and taken some snaps on my iPhone around the house to show you how it looks so far. Usually I don’t feel very comfortable sharing a room until it is finished but this house is going to be an ongoing project for us over years rather than weeks and months so even though it doesn’t look how I would like it to yet, I want to show you around now and tell you about my plans for the future. It’s certainly not a flashy or highly styled interior, mostly dictated by my simple taste but also ruled by our restricted budget. Basically all of our funds went on bringing this house back to life and up to date structurally so there wasn’t much left for furnishing the house other than what we were able to bring from our flat (well, the items that fitted as our bed and sofa didn’t!). Anyway, I’m totally happy about not being able to make it ‘perfect’ from the start as I really do think the best interiors grow organically over time and there would be no fun for me if it was all done – what would I possibly have to do if I wasn’t continuously making plans about what to add or takeaway to each room? 😉 Also, I haven’t put anything on the walls yet really so that is all to come too.

I thought it would be useful to work through one room at a time on the blog so I’m starting in the sitting room that has now been knocked through to the dining room and kitchen to make one large room downstairs but I will show you those two spaces separately as there is too much to say in one post.

Throughout the house the walls and ceilings were taken back to brick, re-plastered, re-wired, re-plumbed, painted and new picture rail, skirting, architrave and coving were added (we tried to make these as close to the originals as possible). We also removed the laminate sheeting and sanded the original boards. One day I would like a new wood herringbone floor as although I like the way the original boards look the floor isn’t insulated and can’t be except at massive expense as there is a four foot chasm under the house. Also, when the uPVC windows are due to be changed I would replace them with grey/black uPVC (as we’ll never be able to afford to reinstate wooden windows).

So, for now, the sitting room is quite pared back with brilliant white walls, Light Blue woodwork, an original 1920/30s fire surround that I bought from eBay for £60 and that was painted in the same colour as the woodwork. We still need to choose tiles for the hearth and I’m loving the Claybrook studio range and colours.

We hung sheer blinds at the windows to maximise the feeling of space and light. The radiator was moved to under the window and we chose traditional column style ones to help add to the period feel of the house. I chose not to have an overhead light in this room as I just never, ever use them and instead we have wall lights in the alcoves from Original BTC and the black angled one that you can see in the previous photo is from Anglepoise. They are all wired in so that they can be dimmed and turned on and off from the light switch on the wall by the door as you enter or leave the room. The wicker rocking chair is from Ikea and is likely to change at some point and we hope to have in built cupboards in the alcoves for the tv to sit on etc.

The main decision I had to make before we moved was choosing new sofas for this room as our old sofa was 4cm too long and the shape woundn’t have worked in the space. I knew I wanted really big comfy sofas to make the room feel welcoming and cosy but we had very little to spend. I had seen the Soderhamn range of sofas from Ikea in lots of lovely houses on Instagram but I wasn’t massively keen on the covers they are sold with as the colours weren’t ideal for the room but the price was ideal. For the three seat sofa at £450 and £295 for the chaise in the window I think they’re quite a bargain (NB the matching footstool is no longer sold in Ikea in the UK so I bought it on eBay for £50 – just search for Soderhamn footstool). I came across Bemz years ago when I didn’t have an Ikea sofa and thought their business idea was a brilliant one – they make bespoke covers and legs for any Ikea furniture so that you can personalise your sofa or armchair. They were my first port of call when I decided on the Soderhamn sofas as I knew a set of their linen covers would transform the look of the sofas and in turn the room itself. Bemz very kindly sent me a set of covers to showcase on my blog but had they not I would have bought them myself. I absolutely LOVE them. Some may think I am mad choosing the natural linen covers with a dog and toddler but these covers are fully removable and wash at 40 degrees. I’ve already washed them after Mimi climbed up onto the chaise with muddy wellies on and I can confirm that they are so easy to wash (there’s very little bulk to the fabric so they fit in the machine easily) and when you put them back on it is not a tight fit like it can be when you wash Ikea sofa covers. They don’t lose their shape or colour – you would never know it’s been washed basically. I will write a full post dedicated to them and photograph them in more detail, which will helpfully answer all your questions. In the meantime, for those of you who would like to know, my covers are the Loose Fit Urban covers in Rosendal Pure Washed Linen Unbleached.

We had all the original 30s doors dipped, which our builder organised for us at a cost of about £20 per door, and then they were either oiled or painted. In the sitting room I decided to have the inside painted Light Blue and the side facing into the hallway I kept natural. The reason for this is that the Light Blue brings a nice dose of colour to the room but in the hallway there is a lot of colour so the natural wood is a nice contrast. The door handles are these ebonised beehive doorknobs, which were the cheapest of this style that I could find. I’m very happy with them so far and I know quite a few of my friends have bought them on my recommendation so fingers crossed they will last.

Before

Here are some pics of the works as they progressed to give you an idea of what the renovation involved…

This is looking into the sitting room from the dining room once the wall was removed and before the steel went in.

The room was then completely replastered.

This is looking from the sitting room down to the dining room and the kitchen to the left to give you an idea of the whole space.

The new fire surround was installed as well as coving, picture rail and skirting to bring the period feel back to the room.

Jules started sanding the floorboards at this point. He would recommend paying someone if you can to do it as he HATED the job.

The colour then went onto the woodwork and the doors were re-hung.

After

And here we are today…

The mirror is a very old one that used to hang in my parents’ wine bar

The Soderhamn chaise fits perfectly in the bay window and Jules and I fight over who is going to lie on it every evening because it is soooo comfortable.

We are still deciding on the tiles for the hearth and we hope to install a woodturner here some time in the future. We also need to figure out storage for Mimi’s toys.

So there you have it. The sitting room as it looks today – nothing fancy and no styling. I look forward to keeping you up to date with changes and additions I make to this room over time. I will also do a more detailed post on the Bemz linen sofa covers that I was kindly gifted so keep an eye out for that.

Katy x

P.S. My next post will be about the hallway and I will publish it in a few days, promise!