Corridor renovation in Batumi apartments: lighting, doors and walls

Passage width: what eats into it

We start a corridor renovation in Batumi apartments with a tape measure. In new builds a corridor is often about a metre wide, and every centimetre taken by the walls shows here. Plasterboard on a frame takes 4–5 cm off each side. Plaster to guide beads brings the surface out about a centimetre from the highest point, and on a leaning wall the layer gets thicker towards one edge. So in a narrow corridor we use framed lining only where there is no way around it, and level the walls with plaster: if the lean is large, we correct that section rather than the whole wall.

Open doors and furniture narrow the passage further. We don't put a deep wardrobe for hanging clothes in a one-metre corridor: you can't turn round next to it with a suitcase, and its place is in the hallway or a recess. We measure the turns and doorways on the way from the hallway to the bedrooms before the furniture is ordered, because they decide whether the bed and sofa will get through in one piece.

Lighting a corridor with no window

A corridor usually gets no daylight, and its lights are on more often than in the rooms. We place downlights along the centre line of the passage about a metre apart, or shift them towards the wall with the cupboards, so that the light falls on the shelves rather than on the top of your head. A narrow corridor looks wider if one long wall is lit: a strip in a profile at the ceiling or a row of downlights along that wall does more than a single ceiling light in the middle.

We make the switches two-way, at the entrance and at the far end, by the bedroom door. At night only the low-level lighting comes on in the corridor, from a motion sensor: it is enough to get to the bathroom, and almost none of it reaches the bedroom through a door left ajar. A matt stretch ceiling is calmer in a corridor than gloss, which reflects every downlight. How to divide the lighting into groups across the whole apartment is described on the page about apartment lighting and lighting scenes.

A little daylight reaches the corridor through glazed room doors or a fanlight over the living room door. This goes into the estimate before the doors are ordered, because it can't be added later.

Doors in a row: one height and one line

Three to five doors open onto a corridor, and you see them all at once. We use leaves of one height from one collection, and set the tops of the frames in one line with a laser, even if the developer made the openings at different heights. We correct the openings in advance: a frame needs a fitting gap, and an architrave needs a flat wall, not the corner of the next opening. The order of installation and adjustment is described on the page about interior doors.

Room doors open inwards, so that an open leaf doesn't block the passage. The bathroom door often opens outwards, and then we check that it doesn't collide with the one next to it. If a collision can't be avoided, we fit a door stop or change the hinge side. In a corridor where the doors are almost side by side, paintable concealed doors in the colour of the walls work well, and the row of leaves reads as a single wall. Their frames go in before plastering, so the decision is needed at the rough stage.

Under the leaves we leave a gap of about a centimetre or fit a transfer grille. Air travels through the corridor from the bedrooms to the kitchen and bathroom extractors, and a closed door with no gap blocks its way.

The corridor floor: one level for the whole apartment

A corridor has more joints with other floor coverings than any other room, because it connects them all. We take the floor levels with a laser level in every room at once. If the corridor has porcelain tiles and the bedrooms have laminate, the screed under them is poured at different heights, so that the finished floors meet without a threshold. The joint goes under the door leaf in its closed position: from each room you then see only its own floor.

If the corridor continues from the hallway, we lay the same porcelain tiles in one layout; how the entrance area of the apartment itself is arranged is covered separately. If the corridor is dry and suitcases are wheeled along it, we use class 33 laminate or SPC vinyl with a thick wear layer. In a long corridor and at the bend of an L-shaped passage, floating laminate is divided by an expansion joint under a threshold strip, as the manufacturer's instructions require. We fit polymer skirting 8–10 cm high: it gets knocked by the vacuum cleaner and by wheels, and it doesn't swell with wet cleaning.

Recesses and shallow storage

In Batumi's cast-in-place concrete buildings, the walls around the lifts and stairs and some of the walls along the shared corridor can be load-bearing. We don't cut recesses into them or deepen openings without a structural engineer. Storage space is found where the corridor is wider than the passage: at a dead end, by an end wall or where it widens by the hallway. There we build a plasterboard box or false wall with shelves or a built-in cupboard, and work out its depth from the passage that has to remain.

A corridor is a handy place for things you need every day that don't fit in the kitchen: the vacuum cleaner with its charging dock, the ironing board, household cleaning products. For the dock in a recess we fit a socket near the floor, and if the apartment is left with a dehumidifier over the winter, we put a second socket next to it for that.

Protecting walls and corners from knocks

Corridor walls get brushed by shoulders, bags, suitcase wheels and children's scooters, and the external corners at the turns take the most. Before the skim coat we reinforce those corners with a perforated corner bead, and in a rental apartment we add a clear or aluminium corner guard about a metre high on top. We paint the walls with washable paint with class 1 or 2 wet scrub resistance, so that a mark comes off with a sponge without leaving a patch.

The lower part of the wall can be covered with panels or slats to a height of 0.9–1.1 m, with a moulding along the top. The wall then takes the knocks, and a long corridor gets a rhythm. Which panels to choose and how to fix them is covered on the page about wall panels. Textured plaster also hides small marks, but we don't recommend polished Venetian plaster in a passage: every scratch shows on it.

The corridor ceiling: boxing, air conditioners and hatches

Above the corridor is the most convenient route for air conditioning pipes to the rooms. They are hidden in plasterboard boxing, and nothing runs across the bedroom walls. If the apartment has a ducted air conditioner, its unit often hangs right above the corridor, and the ceiling is lowered by 25–30 cm. How the pipes are routed and where the units go is described on the page about multi-split and ducted systems.

Above the pipe joints, the condensate pump and the unit itself we leave an access hatch, and mark its position on the diagram in the handover file. We don't put downlights or run LED strip right up against the hatch, so that it can be opened without taking the lights out.

How much a corridor renovation costs in a Batumi apartment

A corridor renovation costs from 690 to 1,020 ₾ per m² of floor. The price covers labour and rough-work materials: strip-out, electrics and lighting, levelling the walls, screed, the ceiling, laying the floor and painting. Interior doors and finishing coverings, meaning laminate, tiles and panels, are priced separately.

The lower end for a corridor is higher than for a hallway: each metre of narrow floor here comes with more doorways, corners and ceiling boxing. Of the separate estimate lines, a stretch ceiling with film and installation costs 78–120 ₾ per m², fitting an interior door 205–300 ₾ for labour, without the door itself, and installing panels and slats 66–84 ₾ per m².

A corridor with level openings from the developer and standard doors comes out closer to the lower end. Concealed doors, boxing for a ducted air conditioner and panels along the whole length push the estimate up. The final cost is set after the site measurement and once the estimate is agreed, and we write the price of each stage into the contract.