Our Apartment!

Hello everyone! 

Here are the pictures of our apartment so far!

Starting in the kitchen:

We removed the door from this corner cupboard to create a kind of display area. What fun is having all sorts of new dishes if you don't get to show them off at all?  I love how it turned out.

Looking through these pictures, I just realized that almost everything in this next picture was a gift. Actually most of what we have in our kitchen came from our registry, so I guess almost everything is a gift.  It's fun to see generosity looking so darn cute though :)

My mom got me these canisters for Christmas from a vintage home store in Shipshewana. It is probably one of my favorite stores, the kind I will go into and buy nothing, because at some point it came down to buying everything or leaving empty handed.

And Jared's mom gave this framed photo to me this Christmas. She had found the frame at an antique store years ago, and decided to paint it for us. The photo is from our engagement shoot. You can't tell from the coloring of these photos, but its actually yellow.

And here's a sort of finale to how my chairs turned out.The paint got a little worn down in places during the move--some patches look just right, sort of antiqued, but others not so much. They may need to be touched up a bit :) Jared's mom found us one more right before we left, so that's waiting to be sanded, painted and re-seated.

Next up is the bathroom! We were kind of disappointed that the apartment has one of those glass walled showers, so our shower curtain was useless. When we were picking everything out, Jared and I had this idea that by living in apartments for the next couple years, we would probably develop a craving for trees. So we settled on a sort of park / nature theme.
One of my favorite things about the bathroom is the shower sign, a gift from my sister, Katrina, and her husband, Brent. I love it because it has a fun story behind it:
When Jared and I were first dating, he joined my parents and me on a camping trip to Platte River (near Traverse City, Michigan). They had these signs up for the showers, and we thought the little illustrated man's showering position was hilarious--sort of like he was doing a dance. We half joked about stealing the sign, but decided not to, and then lusted after it for the next couple years. This past summer, my family took a camping trip to Platte River, and once again, Jared and I almost stole the sign. "Almost" as in we actually got up in the middle of the night, snuck out with a screw driver and stood in front of the sign, about to act...but then our conscience got the best of us, and we resisted and went back to bed. Little did we know, as soon as we got back from the trip, Katie and Brent went online and found the sign. and then gave it to us this past month as a going away gift. We were thrilled!

This is one of the projects I was working on during the Christmas season. The two bikes are actually bikes Jared and I own, so it was kind of fun to recreate them in stitching.

Here's a close up of the middle panel. The quote is from "Oh The Places You Will Go" by Dr. Seuss (or as I put, T.S. Geisel--it sounds kind of more grown up than Dr. Seuss). The whole piece is kind of a reminder that we are here to explore, to see mountains and oceans and orcas, so lets do it. It also makes for good bathroom reading (hehehe).

And probably my second favorite feature of the bathroom is our trash can. It's so Oscar the Grouch, I love it :)

And moving on...The Living Room. This is the room that is the most incomplete. We have some mix matched furniture, and a borrowed, couch, so we're doing the best we can to make it our own. We bought a duvet cover from Ikea (only a half hour away--awesome! and potentially dangerous) to cover the futon, and found a couple rugs we like.

Anna and Adam commissioned Adam's grandpa to make us this beautiful bookshelf. The top folds up to make a secret (well, not so secret anymore) compartment that the people helping us move in said was perfect for a gun....probably not so much :)

And I also got the national parks calendar I was talking about in a previous post for Christmas, so we've cut those out and are planning on mounting them on canvas. We also bought a bunch of frames to make a photo border, so even if we're far away from home we can still be surrounded by our family and friends.

And this is the entry to our bedroom. Jared made these panels for me for my birthday by modge podging pages out of books onto canvas, and then he painted on the letters.

We also have one more room, but to be honest it's a little bit shamefully messy. I'm sure we'll make it cool soon here, it'll be our office and work space, so it will get a lot of use, and I need a clean space to be productive. 

Well I hope you enjoyed our little apartment tour! It was definitely worth the wait. 

Love from Langley!