house tour: apartment eight

Welcome to our apartment. As we make our changes and put our stamp on the things we already have, I want you to be able to look back at the original. Here goes. After {almost} seven months of living here with Matthew, this is where we are.

When you walk in the front door you have a straight shot to everything. The doorway and the "window" on the left lead to the kitchen, and there's a dining room where you can see the side profile of the chair against the far door. That door leads to our bedroom. You can see our first pets on top of the bookshelf, with the cork board I made above it. 

The right side of the living room showcases our rocking chair, lamp, bookshelf, and china cabinet. Obviously, that side of the room is also currently featuring our Christmas tree. We're winning the apartment complex gift wrapping competition {we just haven't told the rest of the complex about the competition yet}.

Here's the left side of the living room. We keep our cookbooks in that cream chest and all of our board games in our makeshift coffee table {really a metal military silverware chest}. Hopefully, I'll get around to making some throw pillows before next semester  starts. 

We don't have stainless steel appliances or granite countertops, but I love our kitchen. We probably won't change much about this side of the room, unless we get a new mirror. Oh, and that utensil holder in the corner is cracked... so we'll change that in the future.

I added this long shelf in the kitchen so that all the stuff it's holding wouldn't crowd up the counters. We keep our bills in that wooden tray so we remember to pay them. The basket, on the other hand, holds oranges. Yes, I know it's Christmas week, but we can't get rid of the pumpkins until we find time to cook the seeds. Oh, and my handsome husband bought me flowers yesterday. 

We scored those three mushroom cookie jars at a flea market for $8 total. That bookshelf next to the red cart is made from the drawers of Mrs. Nowak's childhood desk.

Here's our dining room. We changed to the rectangle table recently, and I like it. It makes the room longer. That's the desk I redid there in the back, and there's the mirror we added the frame to. In the reflection of the mirror, you can see our small "hallway" between the dining room and the bathroom.

That's the pallet shelf we made. We keep the typewriter there for our guests to sign, and I love reading their notes. There's our owl umbrella holder {named Miss Ells}, but as you can see she's missing her umbrella.

 The first time I posted this, I couldn't show you the bedroom yet because some of the presents were still unwrapped. But Christmas is over, and here's our bedroom. I consider it the room of the house that needs the most ch-ch-ch-changes.

You walk in to the side of my dresser {and a rolled up rug that used to be in our Dining Room but would not lay flat without a non-slip-pad}. We have two large {unframed} mirrors on the wall with the window {free off craigslist} in need of some frames, a cedar hope chest{free} that desperately needs to be refinished, and a framed picture of the cavalier hotel {our second honeymoon spot} taken in the 1930s.

There's our full sized bed {we'd rather be snuggly then 5 feet apart} with our duvet cover. We keep an extra blanket on there when it's freezing cold outside. We added that window unit to keep us cool in the summer.

We rearranged the room a couple of months ago to add this little seating area and give us a reading lamp {free}. That's the chair I reupholstered as one of my first married projects. My great- grandfather made that side table {and we received it as a wedding gift}.

That is Matt's gooseswanduck Percy. Someday I hope he gets to live in a more prominent room of our house {like an entry way, to welcome guests} but for now, he keeps us company. I love having a full length mirror {like my Grammie used to have} and I hope that someday my children will pretend they can step through it into another world, just like I used to. The cluster of shelves above it doesn't work like I wanted it to. Originally, when we registered for it, I thought that the dark color in our duvet was black {it's a very dark navy/charcoal} so I had those black floating shelves and frames... but... they're the only black thing in the room now. Not working. I still love our old fashioned camera collection, my mother-of-pearl bowl from Wales, and our little wedding memorabilia {those white birds were our cake topper, and I framed my veil with our cake cutting set}, but it needs to be displayed in a different way/somewhere else. We'll see what happens. I would love to do some sort of white uniform frames with quotes/pictures, but all in good time.

One last panoramic shot to finish the whole thing off. 

Well, now you've seen it. We'll continue to tweak it as we go, and I hope you keep up. :)