A New Look For the Nook

Hey there! So today’s post is a fun one because I dug it up from the bottom of the “drafts” pile… it’s been sitting, half completed since January! I thought that since this space has come quite far even since this post was written, well, it was high time to show you a few of those updates. Which means that we should start back at the beginning and bring you up to speed… with this post… circa January. 🙂

At the top of our steps, we have a little corner that is just begging for some style. Here it is when we bought the house (hey, Dad!):

Then we painted everything a yellow-ish beige…

After a year, I realized that I really didn’t love that color and we changed it up by repainting the entire space a light gray/blue (the staircase, family room, and upstairs hall… you can see that post here). Here it is, mid paint job:

During this phase, we had a collection of things hanging out in that nook of a hallway upstairs… a mirror, side table, and a mint sewing machine just for fun. It was fine, but it was never meant to be a permanent fix to the space.

And then, in came the board and batten (which we love… you can see how we did it here) and this threw everything for a loop.

No longer would the mirror be able to hang in its original position- the board and batten came up too high so the bottom third of the mirror hung awkwardly over the lip of the board.

Yep, that’s not going to work. Our first thought was to raise the mirror up, but we were concerned that the mirror would be too tall to be hung that high (the top would be almost even with the top of the door frame). Also, we were playing around with adding a different light fixture- one that would hang down a bit further than the current one and having the mirror there might make it too busy.

And then. And then I remembered that we had a piece of art that had been gifted to us as a wedding gift. It’s a beautiful picture of the ocean and was made by someone in our family, but we could never find the perfect place to hang it. We don’t have a lot of rooms to work with and we wanted to hang it somewhere that we would see it a lot. It started in the Spare Bedroom, but that didn’t feel like the perfect place (it’s that one on the right in the picture below)…

So I gave it a whirl, switched up the frame to something sleek and white to contrast with the darker hues of the art, and hung it just above our new board and batten. As much as I love mirrors (they are so helpful with reflecting light and making spaces feel bigger), I may have experienced love at first sight with this piece of art in this space.

The clean lines of the frame compliment the crisp white of the board and batten. Actually, I think that all of the bright white opens up the space and makes it feel just as light and airy as a mirror would. And, of course, now our painting has a front and center role in the house- we get to enjoy it every time we go up and down the steps! Plus, whatever fun odds and ends find their way onto that table…

This new look made me really excited for the potential for this space- I can’t wait to get that light hung (the one we got for Christmas from this post) and start thinking about what should go in the corner and how to style it…

Spoiler Alert… The light is now hung, the outlet now re-covered, and the frame got a little “frame hack” upgrade! All of those posts are coming your way this week, so stay tuned! 🙂