Operation No More Yellow Hallway: The Update

Last weekend, we got one side (the easy side, truth be told) of our mile-long hallway scrubbed, primed and painted. For more than a year, every time we've made the arduous journey from our kitchen to our living room, we've had to swim through a churning sea of buttercup yellows, mysterious gouges, strange, un-scrub-away-able smudges and random splashes of potential replacement paint colors. But no more! As of about 11:00 pm last night, the new color has been picked (Ralph Lauren's "cinderblock," which is a bit greener than we'd anticipated), the last remaining touchups have been touched up and the entire east wall of our hallway is now a solid expanse of slightly verdant, masonry-hued drywall:

Obviously, the hallway hasn't been fabuloused up yet. We still need to hang pictures. And install new electrical switches and outlets. And set out irregularly shaped earthen vases arranged with clusters of dried eucalyptus, which is how gay men are contractually obligated to decorate. And, of course, we also have to paint the whole west side of the hallway as well, which will involve working around lots of doors. Which means painting lots of trim. Which is not exactly a bucket of kittens. But still: Progress!

The white door in the center of the picture—which is so thin you can hear people digging their keys out of their pockets on the other side of it—also has to be be removed, sanded and painted one of those dark colors currently taped up for our thoughtful evaluation. Then I'm going to strip and refinish the beautiful art deco door hardware, which had been painted over by some mouth-breathing cretin who probably doesn't decorate with eucalyptus, if you know what I mean. And before the door gets rehung, I'm going to install sound-blocking gaskets around its perimeter. Because we're tired of hearing our neighbors dig for their keys. And—if I can figure out how to do this—we also want to install a tufted-leather upholstered panel in the recessed part of the door in the hopes that it will offer further sound-blocking properties. But again, the door is so damn thin that I'm not sure what kind of mounting hardware I can use that won't poke through to the other side. And nobody wants to see mounting hardware sticking through our front door. Because it totally doesn't go with eucalyptus.