My Back Entrance

We use the back entrance of our house all of the time. Rarely do we use the front, and we encourage people to just come round back. Until we painted it I was embarrassed to welcome people into my home in the state it was in.
You know how I've complained before about the crappy workmanship by the last owners? This space epitomized all of the bad things in our house, all in one spot. I won't go into massive detail here, but follow along and you will get a taste of shoddy painting and weird electrical and then you will see how much nicer it is now!!!

BEFORE:
Ugly brown, one coat of sloppy paint, a four-switch switch plate where there are only three switches, nictoine stains, everything painted one colour, broken ceiling fan that appeared to have caught fire at one point (yes you heard that.. IT HAD CAUGHT FIRE AND WAS NEVER REMOVED!!!!!), gross carpet, dingy feeling ambience.

blech

double blech

I didn't even get a picture of the old ceiling fan because we pretty much beat it up and tossed it out. It was a hazard to good taste but a hazard to our home as well. Bye bye!

AFTER:

trim and door painted white! holy freshness Batman!

the view into my kitchen

still have ugly carpet. funky baseboards going on here. these stairs used to be a closet.

the view to the back door

As you can see, it is one million times brighter and happier in this space. The ceiling is so high that when it was painted the ugly brown it just looked like a giant empty space of suck. The paint colour is called Vanilla Milkshake (in Behr paint, I swear by it) and I was so lucky to have picvked it up from the mis-tint section at Home Depot. It was $8! I wanted a light yellow but the shade didn't really matter so when I saw it I got REALLY EXCITED. I don't know how much I totally love this colour but you know what? At this stage I don't care!!! It will look better once we put down new carpet or tiles at the back. Blue just doesn't go with anything :)
As I said, the stairs used to be the cloest in the downstairs bedroom which is now my kitchen. There is some funky shit going down in this space due to some shoddy workmanship but really this isn't the worst I have seen in this house! If you see that picture of the baseboards you can see how the section of wall going up kind of slinks out of nowhere and turns into a bulkhead:

This is the new light we bought. It is hard to get a real good picture of it, but I quite like it. It is made out of real metal and glass, not plastic! Woo hoo! Also it hasn't been burned so that is a plus.
Thankfully there wasn't much technical stuff to be done here besides putting in the new light and painting, but we had our electrician come in while we were doing the den because the wall with the light switches here was shared with the den and we had to do some switching around of switches. He put new switches in, and now we can turn on the basement light at the top of the stairs, not just at the bottom (which is SO AWESOME! Don't take this feature for granted!). I bought a heavy solid brass faceplate at the ReStore on Walkley that had three holes for switches not four... yes they do actually make these! You wouldn't have known that by seeing the old one!

scratched up by hey so am I.

Anyways all new electrical, new switches, new fresh paint, and some artwork really spruced up this dark hole.

value village for $5

check out all that yarn art goodness! this was in great shape, no stains or age spots.

another value village find, only $7. oil painting with no frame. have to make one for it one day!

Greg also made a coat rack out of a piece of old painted wood he found in the garage.

So now when you come to my house you'll be greeted by warm sunshine! Please stop by whenever you want :) We'd be happy to see you!