Cure my long, bare hallway

This month, I am participating in the Apartment Therapy (apartmenttherapy.com) Apartment Cure.  This means that each day, I'm assigned a small (supposedly 20 minute) task toward "curing" my apartment's ails.  I've posted a couple of rooms, and a couple of others are coming down the pipelines, with a few tweaks to go.  The cure is happening in a very timely manner, as I need that last bit of motivation to complete all the little tasks to make this apartment a home.

Today's task: Search for inspirational photos to help with a design dilema.

My dilema: my loooong hallway. I painted it a nice, pale blue when we moved in, and I'm happy with that.  I'm also happy with the first part of the hallway, which I've treated as an extension of the living room.  I found zero pictures that I liked.

I'm finding myself really challenged in this little jog in the hallway.  It adds character, yes.  It keeps the whole apartment from feeling like a bowling alley, sure. But it takes up so many square feet!  I mean, it would be a whole additional room if it were smushed into a different shape!

 

I need help.

A couple things I'd like to accomplish here:

1. Find some way to tack down that cord that runs across the hall.  There is no grounded outlet in the 2nd bedroom/office, and that is where the desktop computer is kept.  Obviously, it needs to be plugged into an appropriate outlet, and it doesn't seem likely that the landlord is going to be fixing this issue any time soon. Hence, the extension cord across the hall.

2. While I do want to keep the paint, I need some sort of wall treatment that would make this space interesting.  I'm open to hanging art, however, it's a narrow hall so I would be pretty limited in the size of art (since you can't stand back and look at it).

3. I'm open to a floor treatment/rug, but I need to keep the jog in the hall and $$ in mind.  As in, no fancy expensive rugs, since we don't know whether we'll be needing anything like that in the next place.

4. I'd love to have a very narrow console table in the space where the hall jogs.  This would serve as a "landing strip" where we could put mail, keys, etc.

5. I'm thinking it would be really cool to paint both doors (front and back enterances, not the interior doors) a bold color.  The paint job is pretty crummy at the moment, so anything would be an improvement.  

Please send me your ideas!