fix up my apartment

I have painted! My living room is now baby blue, and looks so much better. I have to paint the bedroom and bathroom now, but I am so excited. My place is finally starting to feel like a home.

I call it a “mouse house” b/c its so tiny only a mouse would fit here. But instead of moving, I’m thinking this is an opportunity to get creative and fix up the place to suit me.

Small-space solutions advice happily accepted.

This week I’m going to focus on lighting. Its got terrible lighting—looks like a dreary 70s movies in here.

floors refinished.
rooms painted.
kitchen has new stove and dishwasher (have to call company)

things need to be moved but it feels good to get this much done

I had a faux fireplace covered in red-brick-colored paint with scars from an incomplete scraping project. This week I finished repainting it in the same off white as the rest of the trim in the room. Fun! Though with the unexpected cold temperatures these past few days, keeping the place well-ventilated was a little uncomfortable.

It is taking us forever. This is what we completed living room painted, floors refinished, bathroom painted.

We traded tools for the floor sanding and stained it ourselves. red wood.

the walls are medium blue and the trim copper.

We had the super put in two ceiling lights in the living room before it had no light.

There are two dangling light bulbs now.

Last week, it got painted, scrubbed and the old nasty broken chrome towel racks taken off. After filling in the holes and painting again, we put up 2 new racks, a mirror and a small cabinet from IKEA and a glass shelf. It looks miles better and is actually a pleasure to be in now.

We used our gift cards (and extra money) for some burgundy velvet curtains for the inside and some blue/purplish ones for the ones visible from the window. These last are a bit on the narrow side, so we’ll need to buy another set, but they are perfect, else. And it’s a lot warmer in here now, as they go down to the floor and block a lot of drafts between the 2 layers.

We got a Linens N Things gift card from my mom this solstice. Today we went to use it and got curtain rods for the living room and kitchen. The kitchen curtain rod we have is too wimpy for the heavy curtains we have on there. That old rod will move to our bedroom. The rod(s) we bought for the living room are black and will be double rods, as we went to IKEA and saw a double rod display that we both fell for, hard. One more double rod attachment is needed that’s getting picked up tomorrow, and then we are going to get curtains for the living room.

Other things that need doing in this place:

Paint bathroom
finish replacing baseboards
redo kitchen floor
reupholster the couch

Just for a start.

my townhouse was complete shite when i moved in. by the time i moved out it was looking decent.

id say task completed.

a little progress in cleaning it everyday. slowly get ahead of the curve…sure, that’ll happen. I could be doing it right now but i am writing about it. I’m meta-cleaning, the best kind. There’s always tomorrow.