With all this in mind, we're treating the front hall as if it were a real room. It has doors and lights and three walls, so by New York standards, we're all set.
To refresh your memory, this has been the evolution to-date of our front hall.
This was the font hall when we moved in, basic and white.
And this was the front hall a few weeks ago, now painted, an Ikea mirror installed, an Ikea Expedit bookcase overpacked with a few of our books pre-donation nation, which is when we donated everything to Housing Works. It also had a lamp, which didn't work, because there was no outlet on that wall (maddening).
And this is the front hallway this morning.
Oo, a wonderful new cabinet from Room and Board. It's from their Woodwind line; we had it built for the living room but it didn't look good there so we moved it to the hall where we were pleased to find it worked well.
On a side note, the field of view on the SLR lens I have is awful and driving me bonkers. I was standing in the same place when I took those pictures, and in the second one we're missing half the mirror and half the door, ug. Will fix this issue soon, either by going back to the land of point and shoot, or getting a better lens for our SLR friend. Also needed: a tripod.
Anytoots, back to the cabinet. I don't like having a ton of recognizable Ikea furniture in the apartment, and that mirror is under the radar, but the Expedit was too obvi...
Aaron hates when I use abbreviations (abreves) and stares at me until I complete the word.
...ously.
Still, something was missing. It was too dark and cavernous, like the entrence to evil Narnia. I decided to wallpaper the back of it with the extra wallpaper from the hall bathroom to spruce it up.
Step one, open cabinet, measure everything, also remove everything.
Step two, flip over paper, measure and cut paper to size. In our case the width of the wallpaper wasn't big enough to cover the cabinet, so we needed to cut two lengths of the wallpaper and match up the pattern, which we secured with double sided tape.
And then the question of attaching the paper to the back of the cabinet. This wasn't the kind of wallpaper with glue on it that needed to be activated, it was just paper, which was kind of a relief because I wasn't dealing with wallpaper glue, which I fear on the same level as dealing with glitter. Aaron wanted to use double sided tape, the same kind we use to wrap gifts with. I thought that wouldn't be enough to hold our very thick, very prone to roll back up paper. After Aaron put tape all over the back of the cabinet, and I tried to hang up the paper, it rolled right back up.
Aaron decided we needed to flatten the paper, so he put paperweights all around it and settled in to watch football.
I threw a minor fit about this lack of attention to finishing the project and insisted on alternatives, like putting Gorilla Glue onto the double sided tape and holding up the paper until it was set. Aaron liked this, but did not like my minor fit / football watching interruption, and told me I needed to finish the project on my own (ut oh!) so I apologized and got el helper back.
Gorilla Glue did the trick, and after 20 min. we put the shelf back in, put the books back in, and we were done!
It's dark out, so no natural light helping these pictures, but you can still see the paper...
Swanktastic.
So there we are, about an hour of effort, and zero waste by reusing leftover wallpaper we had no other use for. Clapping! All done. Well, almost all done, we still need lighting and a rug and I'm interested in pricing out a marble slab for the top of that cabinet...
What do you think of the cabinet sprucing? An improvement from the Expedit? Ever do anything like this yourself?
