the story of a hall – part II

With the walls painted, the staircase spruced up, the next step was furnishing and decorating.

I knew I wanted a console table, maybe an accent chair and a gallery wall. I was looking for something long, narrow, modern, and affordable console table. Anything I liked was either way too expensive or too small or too big for the space. This table was taking too long to find. Meanwhile I was getting tired of looking at an empty Hall.

We had this gorgeous piece that my mother-in-law got from a relative and gave to the mister. It was a very small, very rustic-looking console. It was said to be a piece a native american handcarved for his daughter as a wedding gift.  The mister had it in the Living Room when I moved in. I decided to move it to the Hall. It was small for the scale of the wall but it was a temporary solution while I kept looking for a console table and an accent chair.

I was also planning a gallery wall in the west wall next to the staircase. It’s a big wall so I thought a gallery of photos and some artwork would look nice. I sketched up some layouts in Autocad. But I was a little lost. There were so many configurations, so many options. Which one to choose? Then one night while commenting to the mister my advances in decorating this space, the mister suggested having a coat rack somewhere in the Hall. So it occurred to me that we should have a series of coat hooks on that wall. He didn’t like the idea and later we found out he was right. The first thing you see when you get into our house is not the Hall itself but the staircase and that wall. So having a wall full of coats, scarves, hats as soon as you get in was not the most appealing. I then decided to put up some floating shelves with a big piece of art. I had the mister nailed the wall to then make him removed and patched everything after. Yes, I’m that indecisive. I didn’t know what to do with that wall.

So my little rustic console table was not alone, I decided to move a big mirror we had in the Guest Bedroom and placed it on top. That was all I needed to realize the gallery wall should be in that wall! Having the mirror as the center piece and organizing everything around it made it so much easier! Again I sketched a layout in Autocad and tried it on the wall. The most popular way to do this is cutting pieces of newspaper in all the frames sizes and place them on the wall. I made a couple of adjustments and listo. My gallery wall was up!

And because sometimes things just happen that way, some days after finishing the gallery wall, my mother-in-law gave us a couple of black leather ottomans she no longer needed. They were first placed in the Video Game Room, but since it was getting too crowed in there I moved them to the sides of the little console table in the Hall. I had two long black and white pillows and voila! Our hall was completed. Well, kind of.

We still had that empty wall.

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