Step by step: basement entrance hall

For obvious reasons there was no basement entrance in my first house, and actually no entrance at all since I didn't have any front walls. In the cabinet house, I made a door and fixed it, improbably, on the inside of the front, because I didn't want to give away the mystery.

In planning the basement in Womble Hall, my first instinct was to remove the central divider altogether and have a large entrance, but then I decided I wanted a larder after all. At the early stages of the basement, I just put some baskets and crates in the hall. My idea was that it was the delivery entrance from which things would be carried over to the kitchens. It was also a suitable space to display some interesting objects from the original house, like the barrels (made from corkscrews).

I started making a diamond-patterned floor for this hall (scroll down to the end of the blog post to see it), but at that time I wasn't yet very good at making patterned floors, and it ended up completely crooked. I discarded it and replaced it which a piece of chequered  fabric (my husband's old shirt) glued onto a piece of old card. It has remained so, but I will replace it eventually, maybe returning to the first diamond pattern because it was pretty and period-authentic. I will have to remove skirting to do this.

I didn't move on a lot, but kept adding Chippendale furniture to it, like the double chest and the dower chest. They take a lot of space, but there is no other place in the house to put them. They also obscure the view of the back part of the room, so I will need to think of a better way. There is a dresser at the back that does not belong in scale or style or anything. It's an antique piece that I like very much, but it will have to go. I will most likely make another open-top dresser. The sconces at the front are fake, made from felt-tip pen caps. The ceiling light is from an online shop - one of those things I bought early, before I knew I could make them.

 

There is a lot more I can do in this room. The walls are bare, but what would there be in a delivery entrance? Shelves maybe?

Through the door at the back you can see the rear corridor that I have already mentioned in several posts. Perhaps in the next post, I will reveal all the secret spaces of this house. Come back soon!