Apartment Therapy
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).
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.
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.
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!
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
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).
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.
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
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.
