A New Year - A New Hallway!

We never do anything special for New Years - just not interested in staying up late or drinking myself silly (er, any more).

Sometimes I'll listen to the scanner and the "shots fired" calls as they go out. Not that anyone is going to do anything about them; when I was a cop, we'd park under an overpass somewhere and wait for the gunfire to die down to normal levels and then proceed out to take the reports. Usually the next day would be busy with people finding bullet-holes in cars, patios, etc. Now that I'm a father I just worry about my family. When we lived in a two story house, we'd camp out on the first floor. It just felt more secure with both the roof and second floor between us and any stray bullets. Still, that was when we lived in Colton and the din of gunfire never wholly abated there - it just got more rhythmic on New Years.

We're re-doing our hallway (it's a typical 50's Ranch-style house with a hallway all of about 11 feet long) but we're getting daring and using THREE (gasp!) colors. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Due to an unfortunate plumbing accident, the carpet in the hall got soaked and soon had that old sweat-sock-smell that says something is dying a moldering death and not gracefully.

We pulled up the carpet and found that the hardwood floor underneath was actually in really good shape, it just hadn't been taken care of. We ended up stripping and refinishing the floor so that it looked good. Really good. So good that the rest of the hall looked even more drab than it did before!

So, we decided to paint and, never one to do anything half-way, I decided to hang both a chair rail and crown molding. The walls will be a pale beige on top of a slightly darker mocha that looks kinda like coffee with too much creamer in it. The molding we're going paint a kind of "old gold" look called "Aged Brass" at Lowes. It sounds gaudy, but it's gonna look great when it's done. I hope. I'll post some pictures on the blog when it's done.

At any rate, it's the kind of project that Mary and I both really enjoy and we've been having a great time cutting miter joints, picking out the crown molding (Hollywood Casing, thank you for asking) and putting new paint over old.

On reflection - maybe that is a pretty good metaphor for the New Year. Maybe we'll make it an instant tradition.