To Photo Wall or Not To Photo Wall?

This is probably the single most hated feature of our current house. It's definitely in the top five. It's our staircase. Our staircase is positioned right at our front door and it is kind of closed it. It's narrow and I don't like how the ceiling drops down about midway the staircase. I also hate the fact that our painter totally ignored my request to use semi-gloss paint when the painted our house and used flat instead. I'm sure you can see all the dirt and smudges that my kids and their friends leave when going up and down the stairs.

See this is the drop down ceiling. I do thing this is the biggest reason why I hate the staircase.

We did update it when we moved in. We took the carpet off the stairs, painted and stained them. We also replaced the wooden spindles with iron ones that I totally love. These changes helped a lot, but not enough.

This is a shot from the top of the stairs looking down. The woman who grew up in the house and whose dad built the house came to see what changes we had made and she loved that we chose a door with glass in it because it was way too dark with just a solid wood door that they had when she was growing up. I can't imagine. It really is a dark entry and there aren't even any outlets to plug a lamp into. As you see I have a lamp, but I have a drop cord running to the plug outside. My husband LOVES that, not.

Now this is a shot of the hated drop down. I want to do a picture wall up the stairs and I don't know if I should extend it to the drop down part of the ceiling. I had a friend who has this and she put a cute picture that her soon had done at school. It looked really good, but she didn't have anything on the side wall. What do you think? I'll have to try it and see what looks the best and maybe have a lot of my families smiling faces to look at when I'm walking up the stairs will take my mind away from how much I hate the staircase.