Category: apartment

Dining Room

Posted by miss alix – 21 Sep ’11










The fact that our apartment actually has a dining room still amazes me. I think back to our old apartment and how cramped it was despite our best efforts, and I feel like our new home is a huge breath of fresh air. Being able to cook for other people and actually have the space to entertain is such a dream come true. I feel so lucky that we found this apartment. Anyway….

We searched and searched for a dining room table and Shawn finally found this whole set on craigslist. It was in beautiful condition and surprisingly more affordable than many of the other tables out there. It came with chairs as well, which we’re not in such good shape. I just realized that we only have 3 chairs at the table in this photo. I swear we have more! I probably should have taken the table cloth off too, but I am so glad that I finally have a tablecloth.

Obviously the highlight of room is finally being able to display our Victrola. You know you’ve found a winner for a husband when you meet a guy who collects all these fantastic vintage things. This lovely thing had been in our dreaded storage unit forever. For the record (no pun intended) it still plays and sounds beautiful. It does need a little dusting though.

That’s it for our home tour at the moment. There are still 3 rooms and one terribly long hallway to share, but that will come all in good time dear readers.

In case you missed it, we started with the bedroom.

cats and rainbows

Posted by miss alix – 20 Sep ’11






When taking photos of our bedroom this weekend, I became a little distracted by the rainbows that filled our room. Since I’m not often home during the day, I didn’t know how many tiny rainbows permeate the space. It felt like magic swirling around the room. I tried to catch all the colors.

The cats seemed to like them too, although I suspect they were mostly just pleased that I was making the bed.

bedroom

Posted by miss alix – 19 Sep ’11











I said I would begin sharing a little bit more of our home starting today and I decided to start with our bedroom. It’s a fairly simple room and I feel like there is room to grow in terms of decor, but I’m also very happy with it. Our kitchen for instance, will not be seen on the blog for quite some time as over the past few weeks I’ve concluded it must be painted white (it’s light yellow now) which will be quite the undertaking.

Our bedroom unintentionally ended up with a blue, white and grey theme. We picked up the bedside table and dresser (and another matching one in a different room) at a thrift store for a steal, but the blue stripes were covered with a country plaid fabric. Lucky for us, when we got them home and removed the fabric, the stripes underneath were a nearly matching light blue to a quilt we already used. It was all tied together with the blue and white bunting from our rehearsal dinner.

My favorite thing in the room is the star chart which I found after being introduced to a similar moon chart by the ever so stylish Honey Kennedy. Shawn and I were particularly pleased that the time frame captured covered both of our birthdays.

I intended to start a small collection of owl and bird art but once I started framing and hanging the pieces I had, it all seemed pretty cramped. I stuck with my three favorite pieces, two vintage book plates and a print I purchased at the last Renegade.

I let this post bleed out a little into our hallway as I think these two sections are the best. As a side note, it’s really difficult to photograph a 40 foot long hallway let alone the things in it. The painting outside our bedroom door as well as the masks are all made by Shawn and have been used in various films that he’s made. I’m glad that these are out on display in our home rather than hidden away in a closet as they once were.

The pink bike was the first road bike I bought for myself, an adorable, very little Schwinn prelude. At some point I converted it to fixed gear making it light and fun to ride around the neighborhood (although she hasn’t been out in awhile to be honest).

I hope to have a few more pieces of our home to share this week, not to mention some of the delicious things I concocted for the dinner party I held this past weekend. If there is anything you would like to know more about in these apartment posts, please do let me know (although I more than likely cover too much detail for the average person).

collections

Posted by miss alix – 11 Aug ’11

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Not quite ready to show a full tour of our home yet, but I couldn’t help but share just a little. It seems we’ve become quite the collectors. Or rather, so many of the little creatures and knick knacks hiding in our closets have come out into the light.

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Busy busy days ahead. More to come.

painting in timelapse

Posted by miss alix – 5 Jul ’11

New Home timelapse from miss alix on Vimeo.

Well my dears, I hope you had a lovely holiday weekend. We did a lot of relaxing and still managed to accomplish quite a bit. We finally took care of a few things around our apartment that have been begging to get sorted (I have shelves in my closet!). We snagged the perfect dresser set from a local thrift store. I knew the Jewish Women’s Council would come through for us, and boy did they ever. We found two dressers and a matching bed side table for just over $100. They need a few paint touch ups but are otherwise in perfect condition and have already made our bedroom way more cozy. I’ll be able to give a little tour on the blog very soon.

Which brings me to the video above, we made a time lapse of the painting process in our living room and dining room. As you can see, we had a lot of help, and it still took us two days. Luckily the video is short and sweet. Have I mentioned how much I love our apartment? It’s just perfect for us and I feel so lucky to live here. Oh, and if you’re reading this in a feed, jump out to watch the video.

slushie

When I was younger, at the end of every vacation, I would make a list of all the things I accomplished. I will spare you every detail, but there was so much fun packed in to the last few days. Hiking, bike riding, Tim Burton, Tour de France, knitting, reading, movie watching, BBQing, swimming and of course, kitty snuggling.

I took a break from twitter and the web in general over the weekend and it definitely illuminated some things for me. I realize that I do spend probably more time online than I should and it’s important for me to conserve my mental energy for creative endeavors. While the web can be inspiring, it can also be numbing in some ways. That being said, I do really enjoy chatting with people on twitter and seeing what people are sharing, so I’m not about to quit, I just don’t need to keep up with it 24 hours a day.

red white and blue cake

And I couldn’t leave without sharing the last piece of our Fourth of July cake, since it’s so darn patriotic. Patriotic and delicious.

moving

Posted by miss alix – 15 Apr ’11

This weekend is the big moving weekend. Yikes! We’ve begun the process of bringing things into our new home but there are still a lot of big pieces of furniture (some of which need to be disassembled) that need to make the trek. I foresee lots of heavy lifting.

More→

New Home

Posted by miss alix – 1 Apr ’11

We start moving in to our new place this weekend. There is a sneak peek at our empty living room. I honestly can’t contain my excitement. There are so many cool things about this apartment that we were missing in our current home. For one, we now have loads of windows. The lighting in our place now has always been a little depressing and not at all suitable for photography. Now we’ll have windows everywhere. More→

terrariums

Posted by miss alix – 30 Mar ’11

After the wedding* Shawn and I kept talking about how we wanted to put our wedding in a jar and keep it. Obviously, we couldn’t put the food, the cake and all the guests and everything in a jar, that’s crazy. We could on the other hand, take some of the decorations from our rehearsal party and a few from the wedding and make terrariums. More→

Apartment Therapy

Posted by miss alix – 7 Jan ’11

In the past week we’ve done a bit of rearranging in our apartment. I’m rather pleased about it. It helps make our place feel more spacious and practical.

You may remember sort of what our dining / kitchen area looked like before. We had added the cabinet as an extra prep area but it was often cluttered, and always played home to my mixer.

It’s now found a new spot right under the window. I’m especially excited about actually getting to use some natural light in some of my photos (hopefully at some point, as if I’m ever able to take photos any other time than late at night).

bunny & teacups

The space is much more open and I love that it features our china cabinet. We have lovely heirloom china from Shawn’s mom and I can’t wait to display it even more prominently. It’s so beautiful.

teacups & creamer

Not to mention our china cabinet itself is pretty awesome. We actually found it on the street and salvaged it. With some cleaning and paint, it was exactly what we wanted.

apartment rearrangement

We’ve also moved our kitchen table to a more central position in our living room. This is great because it allows for more seating, whereas before it was against the wall and could only seat 3. We added a big bench on one side which definitely draws guests into sitting at the table.

Since the table doubles as a work space for me, the move is also great since I can now be in the living room when I’m crafting or sewing. No longer shall I be cast out when working on projects. Equally awesome is that I can now watch movies while I work. Sweet!

apartment rearrangement

We got some new mounts for a couple of our bikes. I love how they look and they take up much less space on the wall than the way they were hung before.

We have a bed in our living room, even though we have a bedroom with a bed as well. It’s a little odd, but it always comes in handy for our sleepover movie parties or when visitors are staying with us (which happens fairly often). Now it is sectioned off a bit more by the couch so it doesn’t feel like you’re in a bedroom when you’re just hanging out.

The leopard couch will probably be going in storage for a little bit, but the cats are awfully fond of it (as am I) so we’ll see.

I’m so happy with how everything feels, just by making some simple changes. Hope you enjoyed the mini tour of our apartment. I realized while writing this that there aren’t many photos of it online.

Holiday decorations

Posted by miss alix – 2 Dec ’10

While it seems most people got the jump on their holiday decorations right after Thanksgiving, I’m a little bit behind. For one, the minimal decorations I do have are in our dreaded storage. Hopefully I’ll be able to dig them out this weekend.

To get things started I made these paper garlands to hang in our dining room / kitchen area (in a small apartment it’s all the same thing really).

holiday garlands

I wanted to create a bunch of white garlands to give a snowy feeling. I used lined notebook paper, because I like it and thought maybe it would give it a tiny hint of blue, that snow has. I then just strung them up on a strand of mono-filament.

I think it goes really well with the black and white theme of our dining area. It feels festive and wintery. Even a little holiday elf came to check out the California snow. Have I mentioned that our apartment is teaming with winter creatures, like that little guy? I’m not sure where they came from but they’ve been multiplying. Luckily they’re cute so I don’t mind that they seem to be taking over.

holiday garlands

I must confess there were a few more strands of garland just last night but the cats already had their way with them. They like to sit on top of our china cabinet and it was the perfect height for them to swat at the nearby garlands. I suppose the the Fargo
poster will just have to be part of the design…it is snowy, right?

Work in progress

Posted by miss alix – 17 Feb ’10

In between copious amounts of baking and projects, we’ve been trying to renovate and reorganize our apartment. One of the ideas that I’m in the middle of is updating the large book case in our living room. It has always been filled with stuff, masks, bike gear and various odds and ends. I wanted to make it a little more presentable and hide some of the storage aspects. I embarked on a crazy mission to not only fill it with our books that were placed randomly around the house, but also to cover them all in colored paper.

First of all, I had no idea how many books we had hidden away in various drawers and closets that now had a place to be. Second, covering books takes quite a bit longer than I thought. Third, nice colored paper is expensive and doesn’t cover nearly as many books as I would like. It seemed like a good idea in the first place, but now it seems like a daunting task to finish.

As you can see, I’m about half way done. I’ve covered the storage boxes with mat board as well. Soon hopefully we’ll get some handles for them so they actually open without the use of a fork or some other implement.

before

In any case, I think it is much improved from before. Please excuse all the strange things hanging out in our place. You accumulate a great deal of oddities when you make movies. Hopefully I’ll have a finished update soon enough, along with some other cool renovations in the apartment.

Girls can use power tools too.

Posted by miss alix – 27 Jun ’08


Well I’ve been making a lot of tasty treats but I haven’t had a lot of other fun projects to show off. It’s been busy over here though. In honor of the fact that I’ll be moving this weekend and this sweet coffee table that I made will be going into storage, I though it deserved it’s own post, even though this isn’t the best photo. I made this following (loosely) instructions from Readymade magazine, which I love. I found the reel to reel in the garage of the house I used to live in and it came along before the place was demolished. I’d like to get a glass top for this piece but that will have to wait for my next residence. Anyway I bought myself a drill to make this and I’m not sure how I lived without one before. Back to packing for me!