 Thank you so much to Simply Safe for sponsoring today's video. Hi everyone, happy Sunday. I hope you're having an incredible day so far. I am in such a good mood because today I get to start a makeover that I have been wanting to work on for a while now. Now I live in a duplex building, so there is one other person that lives underneath me and then we actually live on the top unit and traditionally a lot of duplex buildings I feel like have these stairs on the outside of the building. However, for ours in particular the stairs are on the inside. So right when you walk in the door there's a stairwell leading right up to the second floor. The stairwell is long, it is wide, it is boring. There is a window down there which is actually a plus for sure. But all around it is a space that I just want to add some life, some personality and character too. And yeah, that's exactly what I'm trying to achieve today. I'm also extremely excited because today's video is sponsored by Simply Safe. If you guys saw at the beginning I have worked with them countless times throughout the year and honestly I cannot wait to work with them more in the future. So many of you guys have actually loved, loved, loved Simply Safe. I have gotten a ton of DMs, emails just saying thank you so much for recommending this brand you guys because it truly is a no-brainer when it comes to home security systems. And I'll touch on them in just a little bit for you guys. But today we are going to be working on the entryway. I hope that you guys enjoyed this video and let's go ahead and jump on in. I want to share with you guys the before so let's head downstairs. So I'm outside of the apartment and I just wanted to give you guys kind of like the full entrance vibe when you walk in. You would have seen this in my little Christmas makeover but basically when you walk into the apartment you are greeted by this huge long stairwell and it goes all the way up as you guys can see. This is the apartment up here. Here are the stairs here and there is just a small little space down here which is kind of like, I don't even know just like I basically the landing but the great thing is that there is a really cute window here as well which I love and do not even look at this. I broke this off the wall. Oh I made this in my pottery class too but basically this little area right here I want to fix this up. I really do not like this tile at all. Is this even real? It almost looks like it's at the peel and stick tile. I have no idea. We have a lovely little spider living right there. That's great. And of course I want to share with you guys the mood board and kind of vibe that I want to portray in this space. So it is a long narrow stairwell and it has walls on either side so it is enclosed and I thought a nice gallery wall on one side would look amazing and I really love this stairwell. How much black there is. It really contrasts nicely with that white and last but not least I thought a runner could kind of add a little bit of statement to the stairwell and so those are kind of my ideas at the moment. Now when I opened this paint can it was not the color I expected. It is quite a bit lighter than what I thought but I figured why not put it on the entire door and see if once it's on the full door if it really does make like an impactful change. However I'm just gonna let you guys know right now I did end up changing the color which you're gonna see in just a minute here. This color is really beautiful but for this particular space it's just a little bit too light. All right guys so I painted the door one coat and I don't like it sadly. I know, I mean I like the color. It's a great color however just for this space down here it's too dark and it's too blended in with the wall. You can literally barely see the color difference. I know that this one's a little bit more of a grayish taupe and this one's more of a whitish yellowy color and I'm more so trying to design around the wall color as opposed to the door color of course so I am going to go ahead and change the door color and I'm also going to be adding the same exact paint color to the window trim and the new color I'm using is Tri-Corn Black by Valspar. It is the same paint. I've had this kind of paint for like months now and I've used it on so many projects but it's the same exact one I actually ended up using for the window trim in the living room. If you guys remember I'll pop up some clips here of that. Going to definitely need two full coats so I'm gonna quickly do that and then we can move on to the next step. Guys so I went ahead I added a coat of the black paint to the door and the window trim and I figured while that was drying let me go ahead and talk about today's sponsor Simply Safe. Now you guys have heard me talk about Simply Safe multiple times here on the channel in the past and that's because I truly do love and stand by and honestly just like recommend their product so much to you guys. You don't know what Simply Safe is. It is basically an effortless user friendly, design friendly and trustworthy home security system. If you guys did not know around holiday season the rise and break-ins is actually a lot higher so just make sure that you are safe and secure and one of the main reasons that I got Simply Safe myself was because I used to live in a large apartment complex where I felt a little bit more safe because you know there's a lot of apartments someone could break into. However, I now live in a duplex right on the street where someone can just walk right up to my door and that is why I have Simply Safe just to make sure that every single window, every single door, every single room, even they have water sensors, carbon monoxide sensors, HD cameras, basically that every single part of my home is fully secured through Simply Safe. And of course if any of the sensors or monitors are kind of disturbed or disrupted when you are away it will call the police for you just to make sure that everything stays safe and the camera will be able to record anything that's happening throughout the apartment in case anyone is inside which hopefully there's not. Let's cross our fingers that no one ever enters our apartment but of course Simply Safe just ensures that we stay safe for just 50 cents a day to get around the clock protection. I think that is an amazing, amazing deal. So if you guys would like to find out any more information on Simply Safe or get your very own system make sure to follow my URL which is simplysafe.com slash loanfox and you can also take advantage of the incredible holiday offer that they have as well because honestly everyone does need a security system so why not make it Simply Safe? I'm going to link them below for you guys. Check them out if you want any more info and let's go ahead and I guess get back to the intro we make over. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing next but I will figure it out. I came back down to see if the paint was dry and it is not dry at all. It's taking a long time to dry and I think it's because it's a lot colder down here than it is upstairs. The floor in here as you can see it's just not cute. This is like a dark brown gray marble granite situation and I just do not like it at all. So I opted for some peel and stick floor pop tiles and this is a pattern I'm going to be going with. I absolutely love it. I got these on Amazon by the way and these are very affordable and they're really, really easy to install and extremely easy to remove as well. So they're great for renters. So this is the pattern I'm going to be installing on the floor down here. I figured having a nice little statement on the floor would look really cute because there isn't much statement happening. So let's go ahead and install the tile and we can see the state that we're in. Absolutely love this pattern. It also opens up this space so much. Something about having this little statement pop of tile down here really works wonders for this small section and for a little under 30 bucks you guys for a renter friendly hack, this is so cute. I'm going to go around and cock the edges here just to make sure that they have a nice clean finish because it's really hard to get like a perfect snug cut. So I'm going to clock around all the edges just to make sure that they're nice and finished but this is a flooring situation and I really love it. I think it's really cute. Good morning everyone. It is day two of the entryway makeover and let me share with you guys what I have already done today. So I already went ahead and I applied a second coat of paint to the door and I didn't end up doing it last night. I thought I was going to but I ended up watching the undoing on Netflix. I don't know if you guys have seen that or not on Netflix, I'm HBO, literally crazy but I went ahead and I painted the whole door. I also have the second coat of paint to the trim here but the next step that I want to do is actually the stair runner. So I want to do a runner all the way up these stairs just because they're kind of boring and originally I was like I can wallpaper the little risers if I want to but the risers are actually kind of hard to wallpaper because they're actually curved at a weird angle so I thought it would look a little odd. I figured I could also paint it if I want to but also I was like why don't I go ahead and do a DIY kind of hack with some affordable Ikea rugs and we are going to be doing a rug runner on this and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to share with you guys the tools and supplies and like the entire process of me doing that. Here is the rugs that I am going to be using or I guess rug. I bought multiple of them though. I have seven of these by the way. These are the Torselev rugs by Ikea and you can see the actual width and length of it here. It's two foot seven by four foot 11 and it's just really great kind of like white woven rug with a black stripe in it. So as you can see it fits pretty good on there. I do wish it was just the slightest bit wider like out to here on each side but you know what for a super affordable hack these are only $19.99 each. I figured why not go ahead and just do this more affordable option for the staircase. Alrighty so the first thing that I did for this runner was I actually measured to make sure that it was perfectly centered in the middle of the stairwell and then as you could see here it's a very repetitive process of using a staple gun and stapling on the underside of each stairwell, your rug and I used a half inch staple. So I've already encountered something I'm gonna share with you. So I went ahead and I stapled it under the underside of the riser here and it looks great. You can't even see it at all from this kind of angle. However, you can totally see the ones that were in the crack. For some reason I just thought if I got it far enough in that joint there that I wouldn't create a fold and kind of be hidden but I came up with maybe an alternate solution of just using a very strong double sided tape to just tape this down in the back crack there and then staple underneath every single riser. So of course then I would go here and staple underneath here and then I would just double side tape it back here because I really don't think that it's going to cause it to like rip out and if it does then I'll just have to go back in with like a staple or something or like a finishing nail and kind of attach it in. And also guys I totally wanna preface if this is just a DIY that I kind of came up with in my head and I will 100% keep you updated here on the channel and on my Instagram with kind of how it works out over time because this is not really something that I can test and then immediately be like, oh, it's perfect. You know, I need to kind of keep it for a couple of weeks and make sure that it stays nicely on the stairs. But as of now, about five days after it still is going strong for sure. And all I did was I really just went ahead and I put the runner on the stairwell, stapled the underside and then once you reach the end of each rug you're gonna wanna cut it off in order to hide that end and then start a new section as well. So as you can see here, I'm going through and stapling that cut end that we just created. And once that's fully stapled you can then go in and add a new one and it's not going to be the most perfect seam in the entire world, but you know what, I am totally okay with that. You also might have to put in a couple of vertical staples but don't worry guys, I'm gonna give you a little tip later on showing you how you could hide those staples easily and I just continued all the way down my staircase and I really love the way that it turned out. The runner is completely installed on the entire stairwell going all the way up to the top. Just popping in here with a little thought for you guys, as you can see when you look at the stairwell some of the lines are not straight and it does definitely bug me on camera but in person when you could see it and all of it's like glory, you really cannot tell that the lines are not straight. If you do wanna make sure that they do look very straight I suggest using a rug with a vertical stripe as opposed to a horizontal stripe. Now some of the staples or a lot of the staples I should say are definitely showing. You can kind of see them right here but what I'm going to do is just mix up some acrylic paint and a kind of creamy tone to match this white here and just go over the top of the staples just to camouflage them in with the actual rug and something else I do wanna mention is I know that this is white and a lot of people are probably like why are you putting white in a high traffic area? But our front door is actually not high traffic at all. Our cars and the garage are in the back of the apartment so we actually have a back door and we're probably going out the back door nine out of 10 times and out the front door just to get packages or like food deliveries or anything like that. There's no reason for us to really use the front door which sounds strange but it's just a fact. All right so here's what I'm talking about where the staples are kind of visible. They're really only visible when you're walking in the door. You can't tell when they're coming down but of course like when you're looking upwards towards the stairs you could see things like this. So I mixed up a little bit of acrylic paint into like kind of a creamy tone and I'm just going to kind of brush it on top of that staple just to camouflage it in a little bit more and I'm gonna, I don't mind if it gets on the rug at all because it's kind of on the underside but there you go. Can you see how that's just like so much more hidden now you guys? So I just tried taking down this light for the past couple of minutes and it is legit glued to the ceiling. I don't think this is allowed to be removed. I'm thinking what I'm going to do is actually just use some Rubin Buff and create this bronzy area and turn it into a brass color because I think that would just look a little bit prettier in this area. This isn't the worst light I've ever seen. It does have a nice little fluted glass which I like that element and maybe in brass it'll look a little bit cuter. Now the gallery wall is definitely one of my favorite parts on the staircase and I love that I was able to reuse a ton of frames that I already had. If you guys watched my studio room video tour which I'll pop up some clips right here for you. Basically I have so many artwork pieces and just frames so I ended up being able to reuse a ton of those and I also did purchase a couple of additional vintage style frames online which I will link below for you guys. So I went ahead and picked up the prints from Staples and they look amazing. I added a little bit of green into here. There is some neutral ones. I have a really large kind of watercolor situation back here with the scenery on it and then there's also some smaller prints as well but they're all rolled up sadly. I'm going to go ahead and start placing these in the frames according to the size. I tried to print them all according to size and I'm also going to make sure to link every one of these below for you guys. They're all digital downloads which costs just a couple of dollars each from different Etsy shops around the world and I just really liked the mixture that I went with. I kind of put it together for a couple of hours one night and I think it turned out really cute so I'm going to go ahead and put these in all of the frames. All right guys, the sun is currently setting but I'm very, very excited to share with you guys the finished entryway. Sadly because this area doesn't get too much natural light I am going to be using some artificial lighting down there just to light it up for you guys so you can see all the details and accents and just all the things that I ended up doing down there which I hope that you love but let me go ahead and share it with you guys in three, two and the final look at the entryway you guys. This area has been a space that I kind of just wanted to spruce up a little bit since moving in because it's just a long kind of dreary staircase that doesn't get any natural light at all and it's just not my favorite part of the apartment. I consider the apartment like the start of the apartment the top of the stairs and I'm like, this is the apartment, that is not. However, now I do feel like that's part of the apartment as well. I love the details with all of the pictures and the artwork and I also of course love the console and the new flooring just the black details kind of tied all together with details up in the living room as you guys can see I have the black window frames in here as well and they're kind of cohesive with the window frame down in the entryway and of course I wanna thank Simply Safe so much for sponsoring today's video. I have loved working with them multiple times throughout this year and I hope to continue throughout 2021 as well because I truly do love their product so much and you guys can get an incredible discount of course and make sure to use my link SimplySafe.com slash Lone Fox which I will put at the top of the description box below in case you wanna find out any more information or get your very own home security system. Thank you guys so much for watching today's video and definitely give it a thumbs up if you did enjoy and I will catch all of you guys in my next video. Have an amazing rest of your day and you guys it's almost Christmas time which is very exciting. So I hope you guys are having a great holiday season so far and staying safe and I will catch you guys in the next one. Bye.