Before and After: A £300 Hallway Redo Swaps Dated Carpet for Fun Pops of Color

Hallways are, by necessity, functional spaces. They’re there to get you from room to room. But that doesn’t mean they have to be drab and boring!

Let Geri Alessi’s (@overatno18‘s) hallway prove it to you. Geri decided to redo the space because “the rooms that come off the hallway were all pretty much done or not far off being done, and I always felt the hallway let things down,” she says. “It had the red carpets from when we moved in, and we’d never really tackled it as a space. It was quite soulless and empty, lacking character and style. I’d always hated the doors to the house, too, as they remind me of fire doors you would have in an office space.”

One day, Geri got a touch too fed-up with those red carpets and ripped them up—even though she hadn’t come up with a plan for replacing them yet. “But I ended up finding a vinyl parquet-style tile that was inexpensive, and then the rest of the transformation went from there,” she says.

Disclaimer from Geri: She advises not doing what she did and recommends always thinking through your plans for a space first. “Fortunately for me, ripping up the carpets worked out OK, but had we not found the vinyl tiles, we would have been living with horrible plasterboard floors for the foreseeable future,” she says. Wise words!

Geri’s husband upgraded those office space-y doors by installing some picture frame moulding, and then Geri got down to painting. Initially, she debated painting the doors a color or creating some color blocking around the door frames. But in the end, she decided to add super small but effective pops of color instead.

Geri painted the walls bright white with paint left over from the kitchen reno, the doors in an off-white so they’d feel a tad warmer, and the door frames in bright pink and yellow also left over from other projects. The tiny hint of color is a fun surprise, and achievable with a sample pot-sized amount of paint.

Geri also turned the radiator into an eye-catcher by making it green. The result is peppy and unique—and saved money along the way.

Geri completed the hallway’s new look with Kitty McCall prints, rugs from H&M and La Redoute, a wicker hanger and black furniture gifted to her by La Redoute (which definitely helped keep the price tally down), and lots and lots of plants. All together, the makeover totaled less than £300, she says.

“The things I love the most about the ‘after’ are the paneled doors and painted door frames,” Geri says. “I feel like they have transformed the space for very little cost.”

Inspired? Submit your own project here.