Foyers are kind of weird. Our old house didn’t have one; you just walked right on into the living room. I’ve talked before about how one of my qualms with colonials is that they tend not to use space as efficiently as they might, what with their hallways and such (we have a super wide hallway upstairs, which I intend to eventually get around to making pull its weight somehow or another). Our foyer is as big as a decent sized kid bedroom, so it’s important to me that it not be just dead space. One redeeming feature is that the big arches make it feel very open to the library and the dining room on either side…visually at least it’s kind of like one big long room.

So anyway, one of the ways the foyer is making itself useful these days is by housing its new bench and coat rack. Here is it all beautiful and posed for pictures:

….and this is how it looks now:

Not so bad, I’ve got to say. Of course, come winter it will fill up a lot more with coats again, but it’s a HUGE improvement over before.

Okay, so then I drew squirrels on the wall opposite the door.

And my plan for after that was to take a dresser that was sitting unused up in the guest room and paint it with chalkboard paint. Because I’ve never painted anything with chalkboard paint, and I feel left out. Also, I thought it would be fun to be able to write on the drawers. Like a welcome message for visitors. Or labels telling the kids what to put in each drawer (nerf guns here! hats and gloves up here!). Or for the kids to draw on.

We bought the chalkboard paint and started carrying the drawers from the dresser downstairs.

And then Dave called me over to show me that….the hardware doesn’t come off! I was horrified. Why would someone do such a thing? There are no screws or nails coming out on the inside of the drawers. I’m still not exactly sure what the deal is….I’m guessing it’s somehow INSIDE the front panel? I’ve never liked this dresser. It LOOKS pretty, but it’s really poorly made, and the drawers don’t open and close easily. So, my plan thwarted, I gave it back to my mom (who gave it to us when we first moved back down here for Ari’s room) to sell at her shop to someone who wants a red dresser.

I suppose we could have tried a little harder to either get the hardware off somehow or carefully paint around it. But I was mad at the dresser and didn’t want to.

Okay! Plan B!

I know that the way you’re supposed to get good deals on Craigslist is to stalk it faithfully for weeks or months until you find just what you’re looking for. But what I usually do is say, “hey! we need a new dresser!” and then go check it right then and there. This actually works pretty well if you want something very pedestrian like a dresser, because there are gazillians on there at any given time. I found one I liked the looks of about 20 minutes away for $65, and Dave called to get the address and went to get it right then.

I love my little impulse buy dresser. It has a curvy top drawer and fun mid-century-ish legs and original hardware. In the Craigslist picture, it looked like it also had a really nice, shiny, lacquered finish. But it doesn’t. The guy selling it refinishes lots of furniture, I guess. He appears to have done a nice job repairing it, but his paint job consisted of spraying it with flat white paint and….that’s it. No kind of protective coating at all, and up close it looks less than perfect. So I don’t know if I’ll leave it that way forever. I don’t want to chalkboard paint it, though. Anyway, it’s good enough for now.

Those pictures up there are Joan Walsh Anglund prints I picked up at a thrift store awhile back (and spray painted the frames). Not sure about them here. I’m thinking maybe just one big print centered would be better–something more modern. Or a mirror. Or nothing! The squirrels could speak for themselves. I am taking votes: please tell me what to do!

I don’t know yet what’s going in all those drawers, but I’m thinking the aforementioned nerf guns (which wind up all over my house) and hats and gloves for starters.

So there you go–a functional foyer! Earning its keep! Here’s the whole thing at once:

Do you notice anything still a little…unfinished about our foyer?

Yeah….that line between the blue and yellow was our brilliant solution when we realized there was no way we could paint the stairwell ourselves. That’s when we started to understand why that yellow paint was EVERYWHERE when we moved in: once you start painting one color, it’s pretty hard to stop.

And here’s how it typically looks: count the living creatures sneaking into the picture!

Oh, you can also see our foyer light fixture for the first time ever in that one. I kind of like it. I should clean it sometime. All those little prisms…sigh.

Things have been kind of slow going lately with house stuff. The school year’s wrapping up for Dave, so he’s crazy busy. And Abe has taken a liking to a 3 or 4 fifteen minute naps a day schedule. But Dave will be home for the summer in a couple of weeks (or not. Things are a little up in the air there. For reasons I cannot yet divulge, but if anything interesting comes of them, I will).