Welcome to our apartment! This first pic is the summer edition of our porch, complete with my two little plants that never gave me any food but did give me lots of joy.
As you walk in the front door, you see our living room. These are the worst pics because we had already started packing by the time I got around to taking them, and I regret this fact terribly. First one's not too bad, though! You can see that our living room doubled as a studio for Joseph.
The stuff on the couch is somewhat a function of moving craziness (I would have cleared it off and staged the picture if I had taken these earlier with all the other pics). However, there usually was stuff on the couch, especially that closest cushion (the unfortunate dumping zone for my bag after school each day), so I suppose it's at least an accurate representation.
Here you can see our boxes starting to pile up and our bookshelf that blended into the walls almost perfectly. We used that filing cabinet as a makeshift side table for the entirety of our time in that apartment, and we also lined this whole room with furniture, which I never loved. Here is a horribly blown-out panoramic photo to give the general scope of the room:
Now join me as we walk into the kitchen!
Don't look at that high shelf on the right because it will make you want to stand under it with your arms open to catch everything when it falls. We tried to put mostly lightweight stuff up there:
Turn around and you'll see the actual kitchen. We were quite possibly the first people to use that stove, and mercy me--it was marvelous. Not-so-marvelous were the limited cabinet and counter spaces of this kitchen, but you better believe that my cooking efficiency skills soared while we lived here. The left side of the sink almost always held drying dishes, which left me just the right side of the sink and any space I cleared on our kitchen card table as work space. I usually used the table for holding ingredients and chopping things up, and then I would put immediate use items on the counter while I worked at the stove. I felt lucky to have such a wide and deep sink because I could throw anything and everything into it while I cooked. I also enjoyed having the sink and the stove so close to each other! I could blow down a pot that wanted to boil over while I washed dishes, which meant very few things boiled over. Cheers, tiny kitchen.
Our flour container has no lid because getting those containers down off of the fridge resulted in more than one accident for me. I broke two lids while we lived there, and I replaced one. After the second crash, I gave up and just let one of the two containers always be open. It helped eliminate the crashing, since the lid could always stay atop the fridge with whichever container I wasn't using at the moment. Also, can you tell that this fridge photo was taken during wedding season? And yes, we still have our own wedding invitation on our fridge. It might be there until we die. Who's to say?
Some panoramas! You can see our pantry in the first picture, and I'm standing in said pantry to take the second picture. I believe all of the apartments similar to ours had no closet space in the bedroom, so that pantry was their closet. We felt lucky to be able to use that space for food storage and other common household items since we had other places in the bedroom for our clothes!
Now, join me as we move one room deeper--to the bathroom. We're just going to walk in, circle around once, and walk back out. I loved the spaciousness of this bathroom, which may or may not translate in the pictures (I honestly can't tell because I know what it's like in there), especially since we definitely have a smaller bathroom now in our house. This bathroom had so much empty floor space in it (so little furniture, you see) that it felt like the largest room of our apartment! I didn't even mind the alarmingly tiny shower because the rest of the room felt so large.
Onward! To the bedroom. I posted once already about how the bathroom was the only room in our apartment with a door, but you maybe have noticed so far that the bedroom has been well-hidden. We never bothered to buy a curtain for the bedroom (although it had a rod for us to use for hanging one), and we never for one second felt like we needed one. I loved the open feel of each room leading into the next.
Believe it or not, we do have a lovely bedspread set, but our bed is the wrong size to use it. Joseph thought he had been sleeping in a queen for his whole life, but when we moved his bed into our apartment, I knew it was a full. Oh well! We've stored the bedspread since we like it and have plans to get a bigger mattress soon, and in the meantime we've loved using this quilt given to us by my friend Diane when we got married. The colors match our furniture nicely, and that apartment was always far too warm to ever use more than one blanket.
This bedroom had waaaaay too much furniture for the space, but we made do since we were gifted a nice bedroom furniture set and wanted to use it. It was kind of funny to have to dance around each other while we got ready in the mornings, but it was not funny to sometimes run into the sharp corners of those dressers. Short dresser was perpetually messy, tall dresser was perpetually empty, which tells you how tall we both are.
Look, a closet! Kind of. It mostly fit everything we needed it to, and we never worried about improving it with extra shelves or organizing tools. We did worry about stuffing it to its very brim, and I believe we succeeded. Can you spot our bedspread being stored on the top shelf? And this next picture documents one of the messiest spots in our apartment because I just constantly piled things there. It's like how some people have The Chair in their bedroom, the one that holds the not-dirty-but-not-clean clothes? This area served that and similar functions. Unfortunate but true:
So there you have it! You might be wondering how I managed to take so many pictures of such a small space (I certainly am). The answer is this: I am a little bit obsessive about documenting the "everyday" things. I've always felt that it is great to document the noteworthy moments in life (vacations, trials, milestones, etc.), but what do they mean without knowing the context of the everyday? So here is the everyday that we lived in for the first two-ish years of marriage. We loved it and have fond memories of the entire space.
If you made it to the end of this rambly post, congrats! You have now seen every inch of the apartment we left in January. If you stick around, maybe I'll show you every inch of our new house, too...
Yes, yes do a house post too!! I love this idea and will probably steal it.
ReplyDeleteAhhh, those first little married apartments are the best! Ours was little too and probably had some quirks, but I only have the fondest memories of it.
ReplyDeleteHouse post, house post!