Progress

A few glimpses of the progress around the new place. 

{homesteads}

{hallway art}

{bathroom shelves}

{hooks}

{niche}

We wanted to tackle the big projects first. D put shelves in all the closets (they are huge, but shelf-less, which meant we got to choose between installing shelves ourselves and just cramming things in there) and he built a storage compartment in our parking space, so we'd have somewhere to stash our tools, holiday decorations and other stuff that didn't need to be in the apartment all the time. The next big project is our kitchen but I decided we could distract ourselves long enough to take care of a few aesthetic issues that would make our place feel more homey. These were all very small projects but I'm so glad we have them done.

We are being super cautious about hanging anything on the walls. We've managed to accumulate quite a bit of art that we love over the years, partly because our old apartment had a lot of wall space. I hate not having it all out, but I think with a place this size everything will end up looking cluttered if we put too much on the walls. We'll probably slowly hang a little more, but we're taking the time to live with the bare walls and really consider our options. I'm thinking a rotating display might be best, where we switch out the art every few months (will we ever do this, though? that remains to be seen). In the meantime, most of our art is propped up in a corner but we did hang our beloved homesteads from Lily in the living room and a trio of our favorite LA pieces from Self Help Graphics are in the hallway.  It feels good to have them up, like seeing old friends. 

I wanted to make use of our relatively large bathroom, so we cut a couple of Ikea shelves we already had down to size and installed them (over the toilet, if you must know - at least it draws the eye up, right?). The high shelf holds towels, which frees up space in the linen closet and the lower shelf has some trinkets and a few photographs that we weren't worried about damaging with humidity because we can always get new prints. 

D treated himself to a couple of anchor hooks he'd been eyeing from West Elm. We try to keep them pretty clear so they're available for guests. I miss our entryway set up from our old place but it would just be too much visual clutter here, even if we had the space for it, which we don't. We moved our old hook rails into our bedroom, so we just have to get ourselves in the habit of walking in there to hang everything up as soon as we get home. 

One of my favorite features in our new place are the display niches built into the walls. I have a little box of tiny things we love and it's fun to arrange them in there. 

We're gradually getting the kitchen set up and knocking out other small tasks on our list. I don't even want to talk about our bedroom because we haven't done anything in there and I'm still using a cardboard box as a bedside table. There's just only so much we can do given our schedules, so prioritizing is key. It makes sense to tackle the rest of the apartment first, given that we're only in the bedroom at night, but man, I am itching to get started.