Entrance Hall - part I

Those two images above show what our entrance hall looked like up until a week ago. We've now been living in our flat for 8 months and we still don't have a place to hang our coats and jackets when we come in from the cold. The only reason for this is that I haven't been able to make up my mind about how I wanted to set this up. I seem to have an aversion to ready made solutions and I have to cook things in my mind, sometimes for months, before I come up with an idea I can be happy with. Often the simplest solution is the best, so all I've decided to do is paint a section of the wall black, and put up two FRÄN hat racks from Ikea, side by side. Our coats can go there on hangers, and hats, scarves, gloves and such will go in boxes on top. I haven't found the boxes I'm going to use yet, I'm sure it will take me a few more months.

What I've done so far is paint the wall. I've learnt from previous experience that when painting in dark colours it isn't enough to mask off the area with masking tape (or painters' tape), the paint will bleed underneath and create an uneven line. So this time I masked off the area and painted over the inner boundaries with white paint. Some people use transparent paint for this but I had leftovers from when we painted the whole flat, so I just used that. I let it dry and then painted with black. Removed the masking tape while the paint was still wet and voila!

Another "trick" I want to share with you is covering the inside of the paint tub you're using with aluminium foil. I hate cleaning the brushes and rolls after painting, and anything to reduce the work makes me happy. After I finished painting I simply removed the foil carefully and disposed of it. Not very environmentally friendly I know, but probably not worse than using lots of soap to clean it.

All that remains is putting up the shelves, but we've lost all our drills (somewhere in the mess in our storage room) so my dad is going to come down and help us with this. This is typical of us, we always loose little bits, the drills for the drill, the memory card from the camera, the screws from the piece of IKEA furniture (ok, this hasn't happened to us yet, but if it does in the future I won't be surprised). This is partly why I started this blog, I'm on a mission to become more organised and spend less time looking for missing bits.

This is what the entrance hall looks like now.

Entrance Hall - part II will be coming up soon... I hope.