Entry Mood Board and Before/After

We have moved into a split entry home.  A split entry is when you walk in the door onto a landing, and you have a choice to go up a flight of stairs to the main living area, kitchen, bedrooms, etc... or down the stairs to a family room, laundry room, etc...  It is not my favorite layout for a home, but ours has an open floor plan which helps.  What does bother me about this house is the entry is pretty small.  If you come in with more than one person, someone has to either go up or down the stairs to make room for others coming in.  Even though it is small, I still want it to be pretty.When I started thinking about this space my goals were to make it welcoming with a little function.  There is not a lot of space to store things like coats & shoes, but I can offer small storage for keys, dog leashes and umbrellas.  If you come to my house you can leave your shoes on coming up the stairs, and I will gladly hang your coat in the coat closet.  And also... I do not think coats and shoes are pretty hanging out in the open.  I am okay not storing them in the entry.

Here is my mood board for the entry.

1. Felt Menagerie Animal Head, surgarbooandco.com 2. Area Rug, www.rugsusa.com,  3. Pendant Light, www.ikea.com, I have had my eye on this light for years!  It is so reasonably priced, whimsical and comes in a large size.  Perfect for filling up space. 4. Art Work, www.art.com 5. Baskets, www.wayfair.com, Paint colors from www.sherwin-williams.com.

Here are some pictures of what it looks like now.

I painted the feature wall and the animal heads are hung. Like most home projects this was not just an easy, no problem, I'm going to paint the wall project... I noticed the wall I wanted to paint blue was panelling over drywall. This was my "holy crap, this is going to be a huge, ridiculously hard project" moment. I mentioned this to my sister-in-law, and she said she recalled there being a couple of layers of wallpaper on that wall. I had a few choices here; sit on it and do nothing in fear of screwing something up, have a professional come in and possibly charge us a crazy amount $ to remove the panelling and repair the wall, or just paint it. I took my chances and went ahead and painted away. I am happy with the way it turned out! I chose Super Scrub paint by California Paints. It was the perfect paint to cover the wallpaper, and is durable for an entry.