Hall Tree Love

I was recently a guest poster at my sweet friend Heather's blog, but I wanted to post it here, too since this serves as a scrapbook of our life, and now our home!

It's been just over a month since we closed on our house.  This past month was probably the busiest and most exhausting time of my life, but we've made a lot of progress and will finally move in next week!

I have so many projects in mind for our new house, and at the same time, I'm also launching my business here in Atlanta!  My future is filled with painting, organizing, and decorating, and I couldn't be more excited about that!  (I wrote that right before we closed on our house- now, it's 1 month later and I'm laughing at those words- I never want to hold a paint brush again!)  One project I started on before we closed on our house was this hall tree.  I've always dreamt of having a mudroom, and in every house that we went in, I would immediately look for a spot to create one.  So when we walked into our (now) home, I was pretty pumped that there was the perfect place right by the door.

I immediately started my search for the perfect hall tree, but I quickly found that unless you got a custom-built hall tree, they were all pretty much 40" wide.  The wall for our hall tree is 10 feet long so a 40" hall tree would just look silly and tiny on it!  The only wider ones I could find were custom made, either on Etsy or locally, and those were running for about $1,500 - No thank you!

Enter Craigslist.  By some kind of miracle, I somehow scored a custom built, solid wood hall tree, measuring 55" wide (perfect!) for $300.  I was ecstatic, considering most 40" hall trees cost more than $300!  It definitely needed some fresh paint and new hinges and hooks, and I was happy to give it the facelift it needed.  One coat of Zinsser Smart Prime and two coats of Cabinet Coat later, as well as replacing the brass hardware with brushed nickel, and it's looking as good as new!  (I would highly recommend both of those paints- Cabinet Coat is incredible at self-leveling to hide brush strokes.)

Before

And after!

Then came the fun part- styling!