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10/08/2012

Our new small home

It's finally here - we went over to our new apartment again today to measure some things and take pictures. So, as promised yesterday, I'll try and de-clutter my head and post pictures with our ideas right here.

These are the stairs that lead to our apartment. The grass you can see here is part of our very own garden, which I'll show more of later. Our apartment is the one on basement-level. But since the house is on the hill, this bit of garden is the only thing that reaches our windows. The small window by the stairs is the bathroom window, the bigger one belongs to our bedroom.

Come on in! I'm not a fan of the red door knobs and everything, but our apartment used to be a kindergarten, so we've got a few of those. I initally wanted to have a bench and a huge mirror in the hallway, on the wall you can see in this picture, but we won't have enough room for the bench. I'm thinking of putting a mirror like the DIY window colour mirror in my last post up here. Maybe two small mirrors, we'll see about that!



That's our bathroom (who would've guessed!). We're upgrading from bath tub to shower, and yes, I mean upgrade, not downgrade. Neither of us is a fan of taking long baths and while it can be relaxing, nearly falling down and breaking your neck every time you need to climb out of the bath tub even though you only showered can get really annoying. We'll get rid of the red things in here, they're leftovers from kindergarten-times as well as the balloons on the tiles. Those will stay though, simply because we don't want to go through painting tiles again. Especially since they're shiny and white this time, not yellowish. We're moving all the things we had in our current apartment to this one, since we -just- renovated it all and bought/built new furniture, so we're not going to buy new things again.


That would be our bedroom. Yes, it looks bad, but that's only because the landlord hasn't put the wooden floor in it yet. Afterwards, it will look just awesome. We can look straight into our garden from the bed, which will be pretty much in the middle of the room. We're getting two twin beds, put together by a nice headboard, most likely made of pallets or something similar. In the lower picture (yes, I know, bad quality but the only one the Doctor took of this corner) you can see the little niche that we will turn into our closet. We're going for something like Martha's solution in my last post, all hidden by a nice curtain hanging from the wall.


Kitchen! Only this picture so far, you'll get the real impression of it further down, together with our awesome living room because this kitchen opens into the living room. We can see straight into our garden from the window. A friend told me that you never rent apartments without kitchens in the States, but over here, that's actually fairly common. We'd preferred to have a kitchen in there as well, but thankfully my parents are helping us out so we can afford to buy our own kitchen. We'll keep it simply and not too dark, since the kitchen doesn't have much space and we don't want it to look even smaller than it is.
On the right side, the side you can't see in this picture, there's a blank, white wall. We're not putting any shelves or the like there because then we couldn't move anymore, but I'll ask my mother and grandmothers whether I can have some handwritten recipes that I can frame and hang there. I saw this on Pinterest once and that's the perfect place to hang them!


Here it is, our wonderful living room. Together with me, super tired because the Doctor's best friend spent the night at our apartment and we were all up until three in the morning. I was taking pictures with my phone to send to friends straight away, so I'm pretty much in every picture the Doctor took. But I think you can still see the awesomeness in this room. There's one more of those huge windows on the right side, the one you can see in the upper picture. Actually, it's the door that leads to our terrace. And you can see the kitchen in the back and - oh yes - the fireplace. I've always wanted to have one of those! Our plans for this room are still a bit sketchy, we might change it up once we've put the furniture down.
So far, it goes along those lines: In the upper picture, there's the small footstool in front of the fireplace - that's where we'll put a bench and our dining table. We're closing the door between kitchen and living room with a counter that reaches as high as your ordinary table does so we can put things down here, for example plates, and use the room on both sides. On the living room side of the counter, we're going to make a little reading nook next to the fire, that's what I really, really wanted and we were worried about not having enough room.
If you look at the lower picture, that's where the actual living room will go. We are keeping our TV table and shelf above it because it's only a year old and too good to throw away. We're keeping our couch as well, but we're upgrading it. It's currently standing against the wall and since it will be in the middle of the room here, we're adding a board to the back for support. It's dark brown right now and I'm going to change that to grey and completely renew the fabric on it. That's going to take a while, but it will be well worth it. I can also use that wall for my gallery project.

Before we move outside, I'll finish up with the two tiny extra rooms we've got in this apartment.



Yep, they really are tiny. The one in the first picture is for laundry machine and other household items, we're adding shelves there to store all these things as well as things we rarely use but keep on hand. There are paintings shining through, another thing remaining from kindergarten-times. We're going to hide the room behind another curtain so those won't be a problem and if we really find they're too annoying, we can just paint the wall again.
The room on the second picture is meant as a storage room, but this is where the Doctor will keep his music things. It has the exact right size for his desk and he can keep all his guitars there as well. We might also be able to fit a few shelves into it so we have more storage room. Doctor says this is good for the sound, so I'll just go with it and be happy to have more room to put things.

And now.. the outside. Our terrace and garden surround our apartment so we have complete privacy. Combined, garden and terrace have about the same size and level of awesomeness as the apartment itself.




Isn't this great? It's huge! We can build our furniture out there rather than trying to find a spot in the kitchen, as we currently do. We can invite friends over, have barbecues, we could even run a marathon on this terrace! We don't have many plans for this part yet. The Doctor wants to ask the landlord if we could install a roof above a part of the terrace so we can keep outdoor furniture outside without having to fear for rain, dry our clothes, etc. I want to hang a hammock and possible swings from the support beams. I'm also going to try and make some tire-ottomans so we can hang out with friends outside. One thing we'll definitely do - we bought this Super 8 projector at the flea market on Saturday and we're going to use that to watch old movies in black and white one warm summer night on our huge terrace.




And finally, this is our garden. The garden hut belongs to the landlord, but we can use half of it AND we may use his lawn mower and all the other supplies he has in there. The garden continues around the corner towards the entrance, the part you saw in the first picture. The tree in the bottom picture is an apple tree that we may use for ourselves as well. And I can plant vegetables and herbs and whatever I want in there! Suffice to say, I absolutely love this. We're going to keep it furniture-free and use it only for planting and maybe lying on the grass.

I hope you like the apartment and the ideas we have for it. This will all make much more sense when we start moving and furnishing and decorating, I promise. And I can't wait for it!

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