Sunday, February 26, 2012

New Apartment Interiors

The other day The Mister said to me - "You had really good ideas for the apartment, you should blog about it." So, here goes...

Our new place has a double parlor and a basically two kitchens as well. A kitchen at the back of the apartment and a galley kitchen.

The double parlor is a nice long area which I love because I love me an open floor plan. I never understand why houses/apartments have separate living areas with the exception of the bedrooms. This is why I will eventually build a house because I will probably have to knock down walls anyways.

In the first "parlor" we have just the typical set up a couch with a chaise and amazing grey and white lounge chair. We also have a blue table set up with coffee table books because even though I don't read many books I love to be surrounded by them, I think they add texture. We also have our wedding canvas prints in here. -



Next, we have the second "parlor" which we decided to set up as a lounge because putting a table in the middle of the room and using it as a dining room would have just cut things off and we would have lost precious square footage. So, we put in floor to ceiling bookshelves and a bar. I am not completely done decorating all of the shelves, but the way I went about it was the same way I went about putting together my wedding tables. Every shelf is different just like every table was different. And some of the things used on the shelves we used at the wedding as well...


For the bar, we didn't want to spend $500 at Crate and Barrel for a bar and since I consider myself the queen of upcycling we decided to do something a little more creative...


The bottom part of the bar is an old entertainment center from Salvation Army that we got for $30...yes, thirty bucks. It was wood colored and had crappy cardboard on the back. So, The Mister sanded it all down and took off the cardboard, stained it a chic shiny black and, viola, a bar! The top shelf was $20 at Home Depot that we spray painted and the silver drink holders were $2.99 a piece. This was by far our best upcycling project to date.

Next, we have the galley kitchen...The pictures are not great due to the glare, but we have three huge clear fronted cabinets and we decided to cover the backs of the shelves with amazing contact paper (Target for $5.95 a roll) and then put all of our new kitchenware up including putting some on stands which I think really finishes the look.



There was a shelf in the "second" kitchen and we decided to put all of our vintage kitchen ware that we used for the wedding on that shelf...perfect second life for it!

Now, on to the bedroom...Again, we wanted to use stuff from the wedding so we used our "LOVE" canvases. We got a curtain rod and sheer curtains from Ikea and used doorknobs as anchors for the curtains. -


In my future house dreams I have this vision of my wedding dress(es) being in a huge shadow box displayed for the world to see in my dressing room. And that will happen eventually...But, for now, I just made myself a "wedding shelf" with my shoes, bouquet, The Mister's boutineer, and two of my headpieces..


And last but not least, we have our invitation shadow box of our invitation which was made for us for our wedding..<3


Decorating this apartment just made me more excited to build a house eventually. And I have definitely narrowed down my style which was a great learning experience for me.

Next stop, the baby's room!