Apartment Tour

So, Frank and I spent the entire day, literally from 9 am until about 7:30 pm, cleaning, rearranging and organizing our apartment. Since we moved here in early November, we really haven't had a solid day just to clean and organize. We have made some minor changes, but there has been a perpetual wall of boxes since move-in day. I thought I'd give you a tour of part of the apartment as it is today. Disclaimer: we still have a lot of work to do.

Kitchen
For an apartment, we have a decent kitchen. The cabinets are not horrible and the appliances are fairly new. My biggest issue is the total lack of counter space. In an apartment though, you can't really change anything. We had to create more counter space.

Our solution was a great work station table we found at IKEA. I use it for my cutting boards, bowls and recipe books. We keep our microwave and Kitchen Aid on it, but when I need to cut things up for dinner or prep something, it creates another space I can use. It definitely came in handy for baking cookies this year.

Some of the things we'd like to work on: Possibly paint the walls, hang up some wall art to make it a bit more like home, and we'd love to get a small cart to create a a coffee station where we'd put a shelf for our mugs and a home for our Keurig and k-cups.

Hallway
One of the things I love about our apartment is that we have a front door to the outside. It really makes it feel more like a home when you can hang a wreath outside the front door. Also, when you walk inside with the kitchen to the left, there's a hallway to the living room rather than most apartments that open up straight into a room. Right now we just have a shelf hung between the kitchen doorway and our pantry. It was given to us as a wedding gift from my cousin Cory and his girlfriend. We love it! Of course we filled it with pictures from our wedding.

Eventually we'd like to paint the hallway and one of the big projects I'd like to do soon is to organize our pantry. It's a great size, but I somehow still have boxes from our appliances stacked at the bottom and no real way to organize all our cans, beans, grains, and pasta sauce.

Dining/Living Room
Our living room and dining area is one big room. We've separated it and created a dining area that is somewhat separate from our sitting area and we tucked a desk in the back corner which we are working on making into our "office".

This is the table we got from Craig's list this past summer. As you'll notice, it needs some work. It has a gorgeous white pedestal base and is great quality. But, the chairs need a good paint job and Frank and I would love to completely re-do the table top.

We got this great little dresser from my grandmother's house and turned it into the beginnings of a "drop-station" for mail. (please excuse the excessive amount of mail in our filing basket).

We also got this gorgeous server from my grandmother. I just love how unique it is. We filled it with our serving trays, candlesticks and other fancier serving ware. I don't like the way it's decorated. I have no other place for my colored wine glasses (which is why I want to eventually install a shelf to hang them upside down like I mentioned here).

I've already shown you the coffee table and end table that Frank made over. We don't have another end table, so with inspiration from many Pinterest posts on using wooden crates, we bought these two crates from Michael's which we plan to stain. I just threw some items on the crates for now--I definitely need to work on this space more after we stain them.

Our "Office"
Our office area is very much in progress. We can't seem to figure out the best organizational strategy, but we've started with getting a filing cabinet from IKEA that we tucked underneath. Then, we bought 4 cork squares and a weekly calendar white board to help us get organized. We plan to put some pictures below the 1-week white board and hopefully we will work on organizing the rest of our filing soon.

Next we hope to work on our bedroom which unfortunately has become the drop zone for all that does not fit anywhere else right now.

This next year will be exciting! We have lots of organizing, decorating, and improvements to make and we can't wait to get started and to share our projects with you.

Enjoy the last day of 2012 tomorrow. We plan to keep it really low key. I'll make some simple appetizers including Frank's favorites: pigs in a blanket, shrimp cocktail, and guacamole. I can't wait to drink some wine, eat some treats, and relax in our pjs! That's how we'll be ringing in the new year. How about you?

Happy New Year everyone!