The foyer is used to describe that room you enter when coming in from outside via the main entrance. The foyer is supposed to be a grand inviting area where you can greet friends and family as they enter your residence. Indeed it seems that all new homes constructed today have some form of grand foyer built in, for heaven forbid guests should enter directly into the chaos of every day living rooms.
The foyer in the Amos house is more of a platform for shoes than anything else. Being a split level home, there is certainly an opportunity to have a grand foyer to welcome guests and lead them off either upstairs to food and fireplace warmth, or downstairs to television, entertainment or recreational games and kids activities, etc.
But no, the Amos house does not have such a grand foyer. The Amos house has a pair of plain looking double doors opening to a magnificent 3 foot by 6 foot platform, upon which only one guest at a time can enter and remove shoes and coat. There is no place to sit down, set your stuff down, hang your coat or remove your shoes, so you are reduced to hopping on one foot while trying to remove your knee high boots, while holding a tray of food while a two year old is latched to your leg.
Before any more guests can enter, the first guest must move up or down a stair, usually past one or more eager children looking for hugs or presents. If more than one guest tries to get in at once, such as if it is raining and our woefully lacking porch overhang isn't protecting them, then everyone gets stuck in a big traffic jam until someone figures out how to open the child proof fence at the top of the stairs, usually the first guest to enter, and ironically the one most likely to not be able to manage the latch on the gate.
Finally, when the last guests arrive, there is a minefield of shoes in the cramped space that is our foyer, making it nearly impossible to open the gate. Interestingly enough, at this point, there are only two guests. It would seem that of the 16 pairs of shoes, slippers, flipflops and boots on the landing, all but two pair belong to our own family!
The Amos School of Construction has some plans in the future to rectify this apparent oversight in construction, and obvious fire code violation, but those plans are far in the future and possibly won't materialize. Still, no reason we can't at least have a place to put our shoes by the front door and hopefully stem the rising tide of footwear in our foyer.
Over the past two years or so I've been slowly but steadily replacing the quality brown, flat, hollow, cardboard core interior doors and solid oak door jams with quality white, paneled, hollow, cardboard core interior doors and solid paper door jams. This has given our house doors a whole new appearance and left me with an abundance of free oak boards to work with. Note: I keep saying they are oak, and I'm pretty sure they are oak, but actually I have no idea if they are oak at all. The wood is certainly solid and sands down nicely, but for all I know it could be spruce or fir or pine. I'm certain it's not bamboo.
Gennie found this nice little Ikea shoe rack that would have worked perfectly in our little foyer where it not for the fact that our foyer is so narrow that even the tiny Ikea furniture wouldn't fit where we needed it to. However, that doesn't mean I can't build something that would fit and sort of look like Ikea furniture.
I set to work in AutoCAD and came up with a nice little design that fit right in the little space we had without completely blocking the second door, blocking the stairs, or covering up the light switch. I was sure to take into account the fact that I had only 4-1/2" wide wood and that I'd need to glue it together to make wider boards. I wanted to minimize the amount of wood I used so that I would have as little scrap as possible.
With plans in hand I set about cleaning up the wood. First removing all the brown paint/stain with a belt sander. Past experience taught me nothing. I failed to wear a mask and ear protection for the first three boards. I believe it's likely that I inhaled two thirds of a board and gave myself an acute case of tinnitus from the noise. I went and found my air mask and ear plugs and finished the last board.
My next task was to trim the edges off because they were not square. Since these were door jams, they had about a 10 degree bevel to give a nice rounded look to them when holding a door. I zipped that bevel right off with a table saw so that I could glue the boards together and make a flat board instead of a V-shape.
I cut each board about an inch longer than the plans called for if it was to be glued to another board so that I could trim them again when they were done drying and make smooth ends. It is doubtful that I could glue two boards together perfectly without needing to trim the ends off, and if I didn't leave that extra inch they would all come out short. While the glue was drying, I took the opportunity to also fill in the nail holes and any gouges in the wood with wood putty. I'd have to give all the boards a second sanding anyway to remove excess glue, so this saved me a third sanding. After all the boards were glued together I cut them all again to be exactly what the plans called for.
Finally I had all the boards ready to go, just like Ikea furniture. It's like I just unpacked the box! I drilled holes everywhere it called for and for a change I didn't set any of the boards on backwards, which is unusual for me, but it did help that the back of each board has expansion grooves in it, so it was pretty easy to tell which side was the back.
Tragedy struck too late in the game to do anything about it. The plans originally called for two pullout doors on the left and two shelves on the right. I attached the bottom door first, which fit pretty good, not perfectly, but acceptable. When I went to attach the top door, it was off by nearly an inch! To this day I have no idea how this happened. Everything else fit fine, but the door was a whole inch off. Ah well, can't have a finished project in my house without it being given the signature Amos School of Construction stamp of approval. The upper door is now just another tall shelf, which still is useful so it's not a huge loss.
Actually, as it turns out, the door idea was pretty lame. It's not the kind of door that you open left to right. This one opens from the front down. It has a piece of hardware that allows it to open to about 45 degrees and lets you drop in a pair of shoes or two. So far it has only been useful to drop flip flops and small shoes like Liam or Eric's shoes in there. It has also gathered a fair amount of socks and pine needles. I am happy now that I didn't get the top door right, as then I'd have two somewhat lame doors instead of just the one.
Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of me assembling the shoe rack. That process went rather quick because of the planning and pre-drilling of holes. I was in a rhythm, and when that happens there's no time to stop and take pictures. I always regret not taking pictures after the fact.
The finished product is shown here, already covered in junk. In actuality it holds six pair of shoes on the right, another two pair of big shoes on the left or three pair of small shoes, and multiple pairs of kid shoes, socks, flipflops and garbage in the pull down door section in the lower left. An added bonus that I didn't consider in the design is that larger shoes and boots can be tucked underneath and only stick out a few inches, as can be seen demonstrated by my big tennis shoes in the picture.
Some of the highlights of this job. First, I actually pre-drilled screw holes and countersunk them so that they could be concealed later. Also, I double sanded everything, as opposed to my usual single or no sanding technique. The design is copied from the Ikea catalog, so I can't really take credit for the two leg leaning design, but it does work better than I expected. I figured it would slide away from the wall gradually until one day it would slip and I'd find it flat on it's back. Nope, it stays right where it's supposed to. Also, this is the first time I tried to put dado slots in for the shelves, meaning they are not just held by screws, but they also slide into channels in the supporting frame. This was good and bad. Good because it was a new experience for me and I learned a lot about what not to do, and bad because it doesn't look too hot from the front. Also instead of screws, I should have used dowels and glue and clamped it. It would have looked a lot better.
Gennie had me put white paint all over it to cover up the wood look. She's been gradually eliminating all traces of wood grain from the house. In fact, along with this project, I also sanded down the banister and stair rail and painted those white as well. I do admit it does look better now though, so Gennie was right again.
She had me paint the doors white too, but it doesn't show in these pictures.
The finished product is also painted white. This will do as a solution to the shoe epidemic until such a time as I can convince Gennie and my bank account that we need a new foyer. I'm thinking pull the doors out six feet, build a grand vaulted enclosure with a chandelier and lots of windows, build a big closet and shoe rack with two benches and columns leading to fancy offset staircases leading up and down with rounded banisters. Here's to dreaming big!
Brought to you buy the Amos School of Construction.
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