Come On In

Our entry is still a work-in-progress but it's coming along nicely. With the stair project mostly behind us we are starting to really think about where and how to build some storage for our front entry since we have no coat closet.

I think I finally came up with a design that will work that will involve some new built-ins in our dining room (which is directly off our entry). I'll keep you posted when we begin that project...I'm pretty excited about it!

For now, we have a cute and fun fix to help keep coats and backpacks off the floor. We used to have a coat rack in a little corner behind our front door but we moved it into the upstairs bathroom because we have no towel hooks up yet. (Remember...we're taking baby steps with the finishing work in an attempt to just get the main areas livable. So things like towel hooks and toilet paper holders are quite low on the priority list.)

Here's how the front entry looked last summer. The area I'll show you is where the blue tape is in the picture below.

This is how the same area looked in December.

(Notice how my wonderful husband smoothed out the texture from all of the walls in the entry? He also removed the texture from the walls going up the stairs and into the hallway on the second floor AND scraped down the ceiling so it's nice and smooth. A crazy difficult mess that made the whole area so.much.better!)

Onto the coat/backpack solution...I found some little knobs at Hobby Lobby in the clearance section for 25 cents a piece! They had ALL of our initials in stock and then I bought 2 additional blank knobs (not on clearance but were about $4 each) for guests to use.

The hubs mounted the knobs to some leftover pieces of base molding we had on hand and we just mounted the base molding upside-down. The knobs for our guests and the one for hubs and me are at the top (since we can reach).

 And the kids each have their own special hook on the bottom set at just the right height for them.

Then we finally got a light fixture in the entry (it's actually an outdoor lantern fixture but I fell in love with it when I saw it...and really fell in love with it after I learned that it was only $25 from the special order dept at Menards)

Now the whole entry feels much more finished. Soon enough we'll get around to adding pictures on the walls and getting a bench for the wall opposite our hooks in the entry. All.in.good.time.