Apartment

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Like I said last week, President’s Day Weekend was probably one of the most productive weekends of my life. What started with just wanting to paint the hallway wall chocolate brown, turned into a whole circus of projects. My next few posts today will highlight all the craft projects I took on over the glorious 3-day weekend. Get excited! Lets begin with what started it all…the hallway!

When we first moved in, we painted the hallway a Carolina blue color and called it a day. Over time, I started to hate the color. It was too bright and when the sun hit it, things got ugly. It just didn’t fit in with the rest of the apartment. It was time for a change. Peace out blue wall!!

And hello new project! Remember when I said I had a lot of random frames and pictures just hanging around the apartment, well here ya go.

There’s a lot of them. And they all had wedding pictures in them. Ugh. I wanted to use them, but I had to switch out those pictures stat! We arranged them into a pattern we could live with and then started plotting what photos we would replace the current pictures with. Willie was a big help, I swear it looks like he’s smiling. See, he likes to redecorate too :)

Holy chocolate brown wall! I actually really love the color, which is good because there’s obviously no turning back now. It’s dark but not too dark and it doesn’t overwhelm you when you walk in the apartment. A win-win! So we started putting the pictures up on the wall and we realized it was turning into a bit of an overkill, pictures everywhere, ahh!

So, our end result was just a few pictures on the wall to balance everything out. Voila! I love the giant picture of Willie in the top right. And sorry about the weird lighting, I’m working on using the manual settings on my camera. It makes the wall color read a bit differently, it’s really much more like the above picture.

And remember when I was just going to paint the hallway wall brown? Well that spilled over into the kitchen entryway and then I scored these awesome wall flower and candle vases from CB2 in SoHo for $1.50 a piece, woo!

And here’s a nice panoramic shot of before.

And after! Excuse the ugly flash. I feel like the brown just fits in so much better. I thought about continuing the paint all the way to the right by the closet as well, but I got tired and decided to call it a day. Oh yea, back in December we added a vintage print of an 1874 map of NYC above the sofa. Get one of your own at Art.com.

Total cost for this part of the makeover: $55 for paint, photos, vases and flowers. Score!

Next up: the kitchen and breakfast nook!

 

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That’s what Jeff and I have been for the past few weeks, but I’m happy to say that we are all moved in to our new apartment now! After several hours of painting walls and one too many trips to IKEA, we can now be pretty proud of our little home :) It’s been nice making this place feel like us, and Willie seems to be pretty happy with his new digs too! Check out the finished product!

The kitchen that I already blogged about. Still kinda proud of it :)

One side of the living room. Jeffers picked out both paint colors, way to go! We still need something to go over the coach. Baby steps though.

Our hallway. Bookshelf and baskets all from IKEA.

Other side of the living room. We still shamelessly display our wedding pictures…everywhere. It’s a shrine. I swear we have friends.

This is what we like to call our “breakfast nook.” The fact that we can have a breakfast nook in the city makes us ridiculously happy. And there are more wedding pictures, sigh.

And finally the bedroom. No, it’s not very manly, poor Jeffy. But he seems to be OK with it. Maybe.

Still more to do, but we’re taking a break for now!!

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Jeff and I spent the past weekend painting our apartment. We I was so excited to finally be able to start making this place all homey! We’re slowly tackling each room bit by bit and it’s really starting to come together. My big project for the weekend: The Kitchen. We have a pretty plain, white kitchen with nothing too extraordinary about it. See below.

See what I mean? A pretty standard, NYC apartment kitchen. So, of course I was dying to do something fun with it. My wheels started turning in my head and they immediately landed on an idea to paint the far wall with black chalkboard paint. I’ve ALWAYS wanted to use chalkboard paint somewhere and by golly, I finally figured out a way to convince the hubsters to buy me some :) So, off we skipped hand in hand went to the paint store, picked up a 1/2 gallon of my paint, bought some chalk and then I set to work!

Voila!

But then there was the task of figuring out what the heck I was going to draw on this chalkboard wall. I had all these big ideas of what to draw and how I was going to theme it, but then I realized that I’m not exactly as talented as my sister and I ended up searching “chalk drawings” on Google Images for design inspiration. What resulted was a free hand interpretation of one of those stick on wall murals you see at Target. So, here ya have it! It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it :)

Inspiration

My New Kitchen!

I think Martha would be proud :)

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SUCCESS!

Sad, but true. However, I did it! I’m done! It took me one long week working at least 12 hours a day, but I completely spring cleaned my apartment! I feel so accomplished and so clean. Things have been thrown out, clothes have been gathered to take to Good Will, and I even got Jeff to pitch in and help (after much begging and whining). But as of 6:00pm tonight, my apartment is sparkly clorox clean and organized! I’m even proud to say that you can walk in our bedroom again. Willie has taken full advantage of his new found freedom. I think he really appreciates being able to run aorund the apartment without Mommy yelling at him, “DON’T GO IN THERE, NOOOO!”

I’m heading back to NC tomorrow, (traded in our cancelled flight tickets after the snow storm for new ones!), so I’m sad I won’t get to bask in the glory of my newly cleaned apartment. And I’m praying to God that when I return to NYC on Sunday, the apartment at least slightly resembles the beautiful state I am leaving it in. However, after a week of Jeff being a bachelor, not doing laundry or dishes and living off of Stouffer’s meals, I have a small inkling that I’ll be just a tad bit disappointed at what I’ll find when I return.

Sigh.

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Ahhh, well, now that the family has officially vacated the state of New York our apartment is slowly starting to take shape again and we’re getting our lives back! We had an awesome time while they were here and we got to do lots of fun things that Anna so eloquently updated you on, (cough, cough Robert Pattinson, swoon!) during her visit. But now that things are a bit quieter, I can finally reveal my new little big splurge for our living room:

Before...

Before...

After!

After!

Tada! It’s no Pottery Barn catalog, but Jeff and I were being suffocated by all of our books, so it was time to invest in some sturdy new bookcases. And boy did IKEA come to the rescue. We picked these babies up for $60 a piece, a steal! Especially considering we had a lovely gift card, (Thanks David, Christine and Faith!) I know right now it seems like there’s a TON of wedding pictures on display, or as Anna called it, “The Shrine to Jeff and Karen,” but a lot of them are going to be moved to the bedroom….which is still a disaster area.

Oh well, baby steps.

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