What we will start with ...

Yesterday I shared with you our apartment as it looked like empty and before we even moved in. Today, I would like to share how far we have come so far.

Our entry way now looks like this:

As you can see, not much has been done yet. Our jackets are hanging from random hooks and nails leftover from the previous renters. Scarfs, shoes and miscellaneous items have no designated spot yet.

The only thing I added were two command hooks to the bottom of our entry door enabling our little one to hang up his own jacket. I am planning on adding a small bench with cubbies for shoe storage, a place to put jackets and maybe a mirror or art work.

Next up, we have the living room/dining room/office.

For this rather large space, we purchased a dining room table with four chairs, a sofa and a TV. The desk is my childhood desk, as is the far too small TV stand.

Here I would love to paint the walls, update my childhood desk, create some kind of smart storage for all things media, books, office supplies, arts and crafts supplies and most importantly our files. Furthermore there is a sofa table and some art work planned.

Moving from the living room to the kitchen, you will see that we added a small table and chairs (from my parents).  Unfortunately we do not have much space in the cabinets and I will need to find a way to store at least some of our supplies elsewhere.

Actually, as of yesterday, the kitchen table looked more like this:

 

And here is the prep area:

For our kitchen we need to find some kind of storage solution as the one in place right now. I would love to paint in here and add roman shades.

Right after the kitchen we have the bathroom which by now looks like this:

 

In here, I need to work on organizing the cabinets and finding a solution for our electric razors, etc.

Unfortunately, during the winter months there is no other way to dry our clothes than on the clothes rack, but once the weather turns nicer, this rack will spent most of its days on the balcony.

Our son´s bedroom now looks like this:

We added the wardrobe, the toy shelf, and the kid´s table. The walls still feel very stark and I would love to paint in here. Further, our son needs a big boy bed, I would love to work on the art area and to create a cute little reading nook.

Finally, here is our master bedroom:

In here, we still need to paint, purchase a bed (that´s a sleeper sofa borrowed from my parents) and eventually add a rug. The top drawer of that dresser is our junk drawer and looks accordingly inside.

As you can see, our problem is not so much clutter (there is only so much one can acquire in a short amount of time) and luckily both, my husband and I, are pretty good at getting rid of things no longer cherished or needed. 

However, what we really do need to work on is making this space our home. This will take a good amount of time, and as our funds allow, we will work on one space at a time. By no means we are planning to fill this place up to the rim, but we plan on making this homey.

Lateron, I will publish my list of activities, so that you can follow along if you like.

Take Care,

Carina

It´s been such a long time ....

First up, Happy New Year to everyone!

I know, that I have been gone for a very long time. When I last wrote, we were leaving the United States and moved back to Germany. We sold a lot of our personal belongings (except for about 6 suitcases) and boarded a plane.

We stayed in my parent´s guest room for a few months (I still posted a couple of times then) and after a few more months, I accepted a new job 2 hours away from my hometime. And suddenly there was no time left for anything.

Work, my family and getting settled took up quite some time and I needed a break from blogging.

Well, the itch to write has returned and I have some great projects to share that will hopefully serve as an inspiration for others.
This June we rented an apartment with good bones, but almost no furniture to fill it with. So here is finally a small tour of our apartment.

First up, there is the entry way (looking out from the living room/dining room):

This is the entry wall:

Next up, we have the master bedroom:

     
       Here is our living room/dining room/office:

This is a big space and there is quite a bit of potential hidden in here.

Next, we have a relatively small kitchen (which is unfortunately speparate from the dining/living area.

Then there is a small bathroom:

 

On the way to the kid´s bedroom there is a small storage room:

 

And finally, here is the smaller bedroom:

As you can see from all the tilted ceilings, you might be able to recognize that we went with an apartment under the roof. 

All of the pictures above are from the day we went to look at the space.

Since then, we did purchase some furniture and have started to make this feel more like home. Writing about all of our purchases however would explode this post, and therefore I will show in between pictures at a later point.

I also have to add an updated apartment tour to the top pages.

We have spent 6 months here, and now that we have covered the basic furniture additions, I have decided to tackle our rooms one by one in smaller weekend projects.

Last weekend I made a plan with all of the areas I intend to work on troughout the year, and I will share it as well sometime this weekend. 

Take care,

Carina

Ikea Updates

I was so excited when I saw that Ikea updated their color scheme on the Kassett storage options, so I thought I´d share with you.

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You can see, that they are now also offering black, dark pink, and tan options.

I am loving these.

And for those patiently waiting for apartment updates: Things went a little slower than planned around here, but I am looking at decent sized apartments tomorrow, and will hopefully move by that week.

And then, the decorating can begin ( * so excited by the way).

Today at Ikea, I started out with a whole bunch of additional cooking and baking supplies, plates, and more.

I also got some basic bathroom supplies and will show all of you soon soon :)

Happy Sunday!

Room for Teens/Tweens

When I saw this capize-chandy in a local store´s weekly add, I thought immediately how nicely it could be incorporated into a teen or tween girl´s room.

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With this as my starting point, I started creating yet another moodboard incorporating a color scheme of olive green, apricot, purple, pink and light gray.

Immediately, I remembered these toss pillows which happen to have the same color scheme.

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So, here is without further ado, my room board for a teen or tween girl which is girly and fun, but not overly so:

The curtain panels, blinds, table lamp, mirror, night stand, purple blanket and wall art are all Ikea. The white headboard could be DIY. The rug was from google images, and I am not sure where to find something like this. As for the dresser - this could be easily found on craigslist and refinished. The slipper chair was also from google images.

Since this room is so very colorful, going with a neutral taupish gray would be the way to go.

A Laundry Room Moodboard

With some free-time on hand I started dreaming up a cute little laundry room space:

1. All of the items on this moodboard can be found at Ikea and are very reasonably priced.
2. The wall color is Benjamine Moore´s Wind Chime

What do you think?

DIY Recipe Box

Yey, today ít´s finally Pinterest Challenge Time over at Young House Love, Bower Power and 2 other blogs. I am so excited to see all of the great projects completed all over blog-world.

First up, here is what I have been pinning recently:



Yep. Recipe Boxes. Many years ago, I sat down and created a recipe binder for all of my recipes.



But over the years, it ended up more like this:



Every time I found a recipe online, I would print it out and stick it in the front. So something had to be done here.

With improvement in mind I went on pinterest to see how others stored their recipes. Seing all of those pretty recipe boxes, I decided that this was what I needed in order to organize my recipe situation.

I already had index cards, and only needed some type of container or box to hold my recipe collection (with enough space for it to grow). At the $-Store (or since I am in Germany the EUR-Store) I found the right item.



A cheap light green basket (picture is not true to color), that was the perfect size for my index cards.
At home I grabbed my scrapbook paper and started tracing out divider cards on some dark green cardstock.



I used a small nail polish bottle to trace on tabs as well.



I cut out my dividers and made sure they fit.



Next, I used the white portion of the my scraps, to create lables to go on the divider tabs….



… and attached them with the white side up on the dividers.



Then I decided I also wanted to label the recipe box itself, so I took yet some more scraps and worked on that.



I used Jute to attach this label to the front of my recipe box.



And finally I started copying my loose recipes onto those index cards. That will probably take me a couple of nights. However, even if I should get lazy at some point and I can still cut whatever I wrote or printed a recipe on to size and just stick it in the box.



So, what do you think? Isn´t this better than my previous overstuffed recipe binder?



At least, now I have quite some space for new recipes ….

Linked up here:

- Tuesday´s Treasures