Fairwell Awkward Wall

When we moved into this house, two things bugged me. One is hard to explain, but it has to do with where our interior garage door opens up into our house.

The other is this.

We have called it the 'awkward wall' since moving in last fall and haven't ever really done much with it. It's at the top of our stairs and opens into the loft area and really has just been a catchall for random stuff thrown over it. We never really found a table that would look ok there and really, it just made the landing/loft area feel choppy.

Cut to a few months back when a new neighborhood friend hired me to do her newborn photos. She has our same floor plan but chose to do spindles and posts instead of a half wall.

It. Was. MAGICAL.

Like, instantaneously I knew we had to knock the wall down and open it up. Remember when we had our wood spindles replaced with wrought iron? I just KNEW that a row of more pretty spindles up there would look amazeballs and thus began the search for a contractor who could do the work for us.

We had to wait a couple of months to get in with the home reno group I liked, but they've been here working hard all week to replace that wall. It was a scary couple of nights building a barricade that would keep Drew and the dogs from falling when it was open, but overall it was a fairly painless project and we're SO glad we did it. I chose some bigger, blockier newel posts instead of the smaller, rounder ones generally used when building houses for durability and a higher end look and the wrought iron is the same as the ones on the stairway.

And now, for the after pics:

 

SO much light, SO much more open and SO not awkward anymore! It's hard to capture in pictures the change in the hallway light, but I tried.

Next up: a family picture wall going up those stairs!