Our home improvements: making use of a corridor space

There is a small corridor between the kitchen and the village/church hall side of the house that was a dead space. Until a few months back there was a staircase up to a room that used to be where the scouts and brownies met and probably things like Sunday school and parish meetings took place. It's now our bedroom so we knocked a door through from the main house landing and blocked this staircase off in order to make the room bigger.

It was decided that the blocked off staircase would make a useful cupboard space. 

So here we go from the kitchen...

BEFORE

The corridor has double side doors onto the road that was once used for people entering the church hall for functions I think, possibly a fire escape. We use this for loading up the car and Sweep's van, moving furniture in and out of the house, it's bolted up so not used unless planned. 

There was a scruffy little alcove that needed some attention too.

Sweep set about planning some useful storage space using recycled materials, so the old table tennis table was used as a back for the shelves. The space on top extends right back under the old staircase so we decided to buy plastic storage boxes for our huge collection of Halloween items, safely packed away and neatly out of the way.

 

AFTER

Sweep made a secret storage panel to cover the cubby hole where the Halloween items are stored. I was really organised and photographed each box so that I know where my spooky items are. We love Halloween! The panel can be unscrewed so the rest of the year it is a secure mini shelf section for small items. Below the shelves are deeper.

Sweep made a couple of shelves for the alcove, replastered and then painted the wall here which had crumbled away. We decided to keep the kitchen bin here as the beagle had worked out how to open the lid and was causing chaos. 

On the shelves I keep my 'to do' tray and a basket of admin - school letters, things to do with Little Bird's autism appointments, leaflets of places to visit, business receipts and that kind of thing. 

The cupboard space has become a mini pantry, we have a main pantry on the otherside of the kitchen but LB was sneaking in and eating too many sweet things and the beagle was ripping open bags of dog food so these are all stored in our mini pantry now - useful for the Christmas goodies and stockpiling dog food. 

The corridor has had a new coat of paint and the side doors have been made less draughty - Sweep made a little peepo cover for the old key hole - he loves making these quirky things.

I think I need some cute accessories for this area now, maybe a tin sign or two, a door sign or something to add some colour. But for now I'm glad the area is functional and looking smarter.