Inspiration and a bit of thinking.

I'm not sure whether or not I've mentioned it before, but we managed to find a great apartment, so we can now finally move. We still need to get out of our current contract, but we're hopeful that this will happen soon.

The new apartment unfortunately isn't as big as we had hoped, so we'll have to get rid of a lot of things. We don't have a cellar room anymore and no other place to store things. The Doctor will bring some stuff to his brother, to keep it in his garage for a while, but eventually, we might have to rent a garage or something the like ourselves. It's about 600sqft/56sqm, so really, there are lots of decoration and furniture ideas we won't be able to actually have. On the other hand, there are some amazing extras in this apartment so that we just couldn't say no.

To give an overview: The apartment is on basement level of a one-family-house. The house is on a hill though, so the apartment isn't actually below the surface, which is great because we never wanted that. It has its own entrance down a few stairs. You open up and the first thing you see are the dark terracotta tiles on the floor and the white walls in the hallway. Those go through the whole apartment except for the bedroom. On the left side there's the bathroom, no bath tub, but we don't need that. A few steps down the hallway, there's a teeny tiny room for our laundry machine and other household items to store.

Following the hallway to your right, you get to the bedroom. There's no floor in it yet, we got to choose between carpet and wood and chose wood, the landlord is going to fix that until we move in. And then you reach the best room - the living room. It's the biggest room and has a half-open kitchen in it. There's also a fireplace, which is one of my favourites in this apartment. It's really bright because the southern wall is nothing but glass. On the left side there's another small room, that one's going to be the Doctor's music room, I promised him that.

When you walk closer to the windows on the southern side, you get to look outside and oh my gosh! We've got 34sqm of terrace right there! It's surrounded by hedges so nobody can look in and we've got complete privacy. And as if that wasn't cool enough already, next to the terrace I'll get my own little garden. There's even a huge apple tree in it already! Garden and terrace surround the apartment, so nobody can look into our windows either!

Jackpot. We had to make compromises, but we're hoping that it's worth it. Now, all these amazing ideas I had about the things I really, really want... well some of them won't work at all. I won't have my own room for studying and crafting and whatnot and we're not even sure yet if I can even get a corner for myself, but we're figuring that out.

That's the floorplan! BAD = bath room, FLUR = hallway, KELLER = Doctor's music chamber, WOHNRAUM = living room. The space within the red lines is ours, the terrace and garden are above it all!

So, there's that. There are lots of things we -can- do though. We have to limit ourselves to the ceilings and walls, mostly, but hey, that's something! I pinned all the greatness I could find on Pinterest already, but since I pretty much pinned everything I found that was at least one tiny bit awesome, I should put my inspiration, especially that part that's possible for us, down here as well.

Martha Stewart coat rack

If you look at the floor plan again, you can see the bedroom in the upper right corner. It's square except for the left side, there's a sort of alcove there that we will use for our closet. We won't have an actual closet, but have cupboards or shelves behind a curtain there. And since I'm a fan of ladders as long as I don't have to climb them, I love this idea to use an old ladder as a clothing rack rather than just buying one. I can also paint this however I want. It looks nice, it's really simple and effective, especially for such a small space!

As seen on Dishfunctional Designs

That right there is something both the Doctor and I like. It's simple yet pretty, you can paint and distress it in whichever way you want and since we're most likely getting two twin beds that we're pushing together rather than one king size bed for so much more money, that would be a nice way to turn those two beds into one - with nothing but a pallet!

And here's more pallet furniture we love from the same blog as above! A pallet couch. Again, it's simple, easy to DIY and pallets are cheap, at least where I live. It also adds to the rustic style of the terracotta tiles. Personally, I love the door in the back, but we'll see what we can do here to make sure we've got support on the backside because we most likely won't place it on a wall but in the middle of the room.

Seen on Thrifty and Chic

Those mirrors will definitely get a place in our apartment. Mirrors make rooms seem bigger than they are and those look especially spectacular. Again, they're easy to make but add a great style to the wall.

As seen on Smile and Wave

We're definitely having a gallery. Maybe you've read the post before this one about my flea market finds - I've already bought a few frames and paintings. And since the walls are the space I can decorate, there will be a few of those galleries in our apartment.

That's today's bit of inspiration. We're going to take a few pictures of the apartment tomorrow and I'll add those with another few things we're going to put into our apartment to make it our home.