The Dining Room: Today

In the spirit of full disclosure, I suppose I'm required to show the dining room in all of its bare, abandoned-looking glory. This hurts me more than it hurts you, I promise.

The flowers really help, though, huh?

Okay, so it's not THAT bad. It's not like there's a dirty mattress in the corner and a bucket of homemade moonshine brewing by the window (yet). But when you compare it to the other spaces in the apartment, it feels so...sad. Neglected. Boring.

We're three people with vastly different work schedules, cooking levels, and aversions to social gatherings. In short, we don't really host too many dinner parties here. (Read: none.) But we've been known to have some roommate dinners, and I know that while I am more in the habit of eating at my desk, on the couch, or, shamefully, in bed, Nathan and Andy like to settle in at the table every once in a while for a meal or just to do work. That alone warrants the need to finally wage full-on decorating war up in here.

This built-in here is awesome, and we clearly make good use of it. Between two former bookstore employees and a girl voted Most Likely to Become a Librarian by her brothers, we have a lot of shelf fodder. While it's nice to be able to keep all the booze and accompanying paraphernalia behind closed doors and out of harm's (and dust's) way, I'm thinking it might make more sense to bring that stuff out of the cabinets and onto its own makeshift bar cart. We already have a table in the corner that's essentially going unused, or maybe we could even get a legit cart. The point is, we have the space, and as you can see...

...things are getting a little crowded in there. Plus, it would give me an excuse to create a pretty bar setup and have a place to store my bartending gear other than in an OR dry bag in the back of my closet.

We all know the deal with the chairs and, while I really have nothing against the table itself, I do think we should eventually replace it. It's just not very big, and it'd be nice to squeeze two chairs to a side and have the option of seating six. Technically, it's a loaner table from one of Andy's friends, so I don't think I'll meet much resistance if I find something better.

The rug is a placeholder, borrowed from Nathan's room where it used to reside. I'm still on the lookout for something bigger and better. Possible news on that to come.

Here's our makeshift stereo center. Hoo boy, is it rough. Nathan threw a blanket over the top of it, and when I lifted it up this morning to take a better look, I can't really blame him. Technically, it is a functioning piece of furniture that serves its purpose well. If you want to be more picky and superficial — which I always do, when it comes to décor — it's boring and ill-suited for the task at hand. Ideally, we would find a corner piece that fit more snugly into the space and offered additional room for storage. Having searched for that particular shape for a couple months now, I'm ready to give up on that pipe dream and settle for something that's simply better than this. 

I told you there was a llama here somewhere.

Annnnnd just for funsies, a shot of Nathan's terrariums that he made for the lichen he smuggled home from Alaska. Aside from the fact that they're adorable (and on-trend!), I'm mostly just impressed that they're still alive. 

Now for the fun part: lists!

GOALS:

1. New rug
2. Reupholster the chairs (fiiiiiiiiiiiinally)
3. Reorganize the bookshelves and drawers
4. Attempt bar setup elsewhere in the room
5. Find a replacement piece for the stereo equipment or, barring that, fix up what we have
6. Keep on the lookout for a larger table
7. Decorate those bare walls!!
8. Clean the light fixture
9. Make the dining room feel as welcoming and lived-in as the rest of the apartment

Piece of cake, right?

The Living Room: Today

Hey, remember this space? And Curious Andy, scoping out the neighborhood?

I figured it's probably time to take stock of the living room, seeing as it's considered the gathering space in most homes. A place to come together, share how your day went, and, of course, watch your roommates play endless rounds of Tecmo Bowl on the Nintendo. (It's football. I'd never heard of it, either. I stick to my Donkey Kong.)

The real hero of this room is Andy — or, Andy's relatives, if you want to get technical, because a lot of the big pieces were hand-me-downs from them. Andy might not show much interest in decorating, but the stuff he brings to the table is choice: that massive antique rug and the kick-ass old school desk are both his, and I LOVE them. In fact, it's because of Andy (I'm not just buying into the trends, I promise) that I'm kind of obsessed with perfectly aged, faded Persian rugs. As you'll see, he brought a couple more with him.

The sofa and loveseat were acquired through a carefully orchestrated Craigslist deal that I set up a good month before we even moved into the apartment. This pretty much never happens and I'm not sure how it did this time, but what matters is that we scored two major pieces for a couple hundred bucks, and I got to watch Andy and his friend, George, try to maneuver them up three flights of stairs. God bless them. There was a lot of pivoting involved. 

The Mission-esque coffee table (and to think, when I bought it, I didn't even know what Mission style was!) was another Craigslist score. I think in the first two months that we lived here, new things would appear so often that my roommates stopped even asking. I was a Craigslisting machine. (Fun game: drink every time I say "Craigslist" on this blog. Have fun blacking out.)

In a rare instance of Pinterest not misleading me, I got that huge black and white picture printed up at Staples using the engineer print option. It's a shot from my trip to Glacier National Park, and I like that it works both if you take a second to decipher what it's a picture of, and also if you just take it in as an abstract mess of shadows and shapes. $7, people. It's not forever, but it's a nice place-holder until something better comes along.

Look at that rug! So evenly faded. Such a lovely variety of colors — not too red, which is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to Persian rugs. And while the pattern is, yes, floral, it has a geometric quality that keeps it from feeling too precious. I've been hunting for something similar to put in the dining room for...oh, probably six months, now. No luck yet.

This is the iron base of the old green school desk that belonged to Andy's dad (possibly grandfather?). In the middle, there, you can see initials crafted in with the whirls and flourishes. Awesome. 

Also, we randomly have a wooden duck figurine. I don't know why or who it even belongs to. There's a llama floating around somewhere, too.

So if the rug and desk are Andy's major contributions, Nathan is responsible for everything music-related that you see. The guitar, the mandoline, the...other...instrument that's hanging on the wall — those are all his, and they're gorgeous pieces. I may or may not have enthusiastically encouraged the idea of him displaying them in the living room.

Also, if you can kind of make out the speakers that are in the left and right corners of the frame (the right one is sitting on top of the record stand), as well as the one that's visible in the previous picture, underneath the desk, those are all part of the surround-sound system he rigged up around the room. Using speakers he got at thrift stores, white electric tape, and plastic grommets for holding wires in place, he wired the whole room for sound. And if you were in the room yourself, you probably would never notice that it was all done old-school DIY.

Oh, and those pillows are Nathan's, too. He'd never heard of HomeGoods, and when I told him to check there for a rug for his bedroom, he was gone for more than THREE hours. From the sound of it, he was overwhelmed by all the stuff and suffered a décor-induced blackout. The only evidence of this trip are those pillows.

One last example of Nathan's ingenuity:

Yes folks, what you see mounted above the doorway between the living room and Andy's office is a homemade projection screen.

(The light in the living room is one of those string globe pendants that I attempted a few year back. There are zillions of tutorials online for them if you look; I didn't follow any one method.)

When unfurled, it provides us with a movie screen the size of the doorway, and to this day, I still think it's the coolest thing ever. We may not own a TV (a fact that baffles everyone I tell that to), but we have a digital projector that lets us play movies (there's a DVD/stereo setup in the dining room that I'll show one day), online video, and even video games. I know it's officially winter when someone caves and breaks out the Nintendo or Super Nintendo.

The black geometric wreath thingy is a craft project I did a few months ago while Nathan was exploring the tundra. When he came back and saw it for the first time, he thought it was made of metal, but it's actually just cocktail straws and floral wire. Ta-da!

Just for funsies, here's our entryway, which is practically part of the living room, itself.

Another awesome rug. The table and chair are all Andy, too. 

Hooray! Another space I'm not ashamed of. 

Back Balcony: Today

I've tried to ignore it as long as possible, pretend it wasn't true, but the time has come to accept the facts: summer is over. With the dropping temps and falling leaves, it's become necessary to begin disassembling the porch paradise I worked so hard to create these past few months. 

Let's take a moment to reminisce, shall we?

I didn't spend much time out here last summer — we moved in the first week of September, and I was a little distracted by getting my room set up and dealing with the pit of despair that was the kitchen. But this year, I was ready.

Our apartment is blessed with not one, but two balconies. Growing up, I thought balconies were pretty much the coolest thing ever, and guess what? They are! The front one is small, just large enough for a bistro table and two chairs, but this puppy is roughly six feet by twenty feet. Plenty of room for the very sophisticated wine and cheese parties I will hypothetically throw when I decide that I'd rather make friends and be sociable than sit around in my sweatpants and re-watch all seasons of Friday Night Lights.

No matter how far-fetched my motivations were, it was enough to get me moving. At first, I foolishly thought that a good sweep and scrub was all the floorboards needed to be barefoot-friendly. It certainly went a long way, but in the process, I ended up loosening a lot more of the flaking paint and saw up-close how nasty the potential splinters could be. 

Right. Put a rug on it! Or two, to be more precise. I ordered these from Costco, and felt very strange doing so, as my only previous experience with Costco typically involves following my mom around their warehouses and eating as many free samples as I can find. I'm pleasantly surprised with these because they were (A) relatively inexpensive, (B) large enough to cover some decent real estate (I chose the 5'3" x 7'4" because of the dimensions I was working with, but there's a larger option, too), and (C) neutral but not boring.

I'll be the first to admit that the final look is a little...not great. It's a big improvement (there are actually places to sit now!), but I expect it to look a little different next summer. A little better.

This bench was actually the first piece I bought, and at the time I was just thinking "It's low enough to slide under the window if I need it to, and it's big enough to squeeze two, and it's fairly nondescript and neutral." This all remains true, but compared to the rest of the stuff I ended up adding, it's kind of...boring. I've tossed around the idea of weaving some kind of rope or twine through the top slats, but there's a really good chance that will look terrible, so it's on the backburner for now. Maybe I should paint it? Ideas?

The pillows, I stole from the living room, because the funky pattern felt like the look I was going for, but something else — more of a large-scale, blocky pattern in a contrasting color — might be more suitable.

I bought all the large plants from Home Depot while on a post-paycheck high, and they fulfilled their duties of being hard to kill and brought in some color. I added the gold triangles to the pots because, while at Michael's one day, I impulse-bought some Rub n' Buff and, aside from having the most ridiculous, vaguely sexual name ever, it's AWESOME. Guys, I can make anything gold! (And for a while, I did.)

Please avert your eyes from the rocking chair. That's Andy's. He owns more rocking chairs than anyone under the age of 75 ever should, but I just don't have it in me to banish it. If he wants to sit in his rocking chair, thoughtfully stroking his beard and reading weirdo poetry books, who am I to say no? I will need to recover or replace those cushions, though, if the chair is here to stay. I draw the line at Old Lady floral patterns.

This chair. I've had such a love-hate-like-hate-mildly enjoy relationship with this thing. I bought it on Craigslist and the person lived smack in the middle of downtown, so it took me forever to find a place to park long enough to pick it up and the whole process sucked. It was one of those situations where you know the end result really isn't worth it, but you've already wasted so much of your time/energy/money/life force that you lie to yourself that it is.

And it only got worse from there.

I was initially attracted to this chair because I was smitten with these Acapulco chairs and wanted something similar for myself. This one has cute metal legs that are also easily removable for storage (See? I can care about practical things, too), and the shape was nice and curvy and actually comfortable. But when I put it outside, it kind of blended in with everything else: brown railing, brown/tan rug, brown bench. See, that chair used to be BROWN. And I went ahead and decided to paint it turquoise! Why not, right?

Hahahahaah oh, Lisa. You blonde idiot.

It was a hellish, time-consuming process that I'd prefer never to repeat, one that involved a lot of careful taping, multiple coats of primer, many, many, many coats of color, and a coat of clear protectant. There may have been several trips to Dick Blick and not one, but two different hardware stores, too. Sigh.

Pillow cover was a West Elm clearance purchase that I stuffed with batting from Michael's because I was feeling too stubborn to shell out for a pillow insert, too. The perforated metal tables are originally from Urban Outfitters but were snagged from Craigslist. Duh. The hammock (yeah, I have a hammock on my balcony, no big deal) used to be Adrienne's and is technically for camping. Don't care. It does the job. 

One last piece of advice: When you finally buy those lovely strings of globe lights from Target that you know will add just the right amount of ambiance to your space, and you string them up and find that you didn't space them out evenly enough and there's a good two feet left over at one end, LEAVE THEM BE. Listen to your wise boyfriend, and do not focus and obsess on that extra two feet that's just hanging down. Because when you inevitably try to re-string the whole thing by yourself at 10 o'clock at night, you will break at least five bulbs. Because you're trying to use a staple gun one-handed while balancing on the railing of a three-story structure. 

Just saying.

My Room: Today

From ominous, possibly haunted beginnings, it's progressed to this.

My room came together a lot more quickly than the kitchen because (A) I needed somewhere to sleep and (B) I actually had pretty much all of this stuff when I moved in. This time. When I first moved to Boston, I only brought with me whatever I could cram into my 2000 Honda CRV. It was a surprisingly substantial amount, but left me with a lot of major pieces to acquire. AND ACQUIRE, I DID.

Hello, Bed: the mattress was a much-appreciated gift from Adrienne's husband, Dominik. He's a pretty tall guy, and that in combination with the fact that he now has to share his bed with another person on a daily basis makes me feel confident he won't be asking me for his Full-sized mattress and boxspring back any time soon. At least, I really hope not. The frame is a Craigslisted Ikea Fjellse that I stained to match my nightstand. My bed was previously owned by a college student moving back to her home in Africa, was yours?

Nightstand: Aside from my dad's trunk, this is one of the few pieces I brought with me to Boston. I Craigslisted this back when I was working for Men's Health and living in Emmaus, Pennsylvania (an experience that has made me swear off the entire state for, God willing, the rest of my life). It was originally this weird orange-maroon color, and the top was a ridiculously heavy slab of marble. I initially spray painted the whole thing an obnoxious shade of lime green because, I figured, if you can't have questionably ugly furniture when you're in your early 20s and live alone, when can you? I later stripped off alllllll the paint, replaced the marble with wood, and stained it. It's really not the best quality piece of furniture, but I LOVE IT. Mmmm...woven panels and tapered legs.

Bookshelf: Craigslisted for the entry of my last apartment, it used to hold Adrienne's and my shoes, boots, etc. that were used on a regular basis, because — and I can't emphasize this enough — it's just a crappy bookcase from Target or something. You know those people who fill their apartments only with furniture and knick knacks that have a rich back story or are genuine, vintage designer pieces? I'm not one of them. I make do with I have until I can find/afford something better. It doesn't actually hold too many books because I'm the last person on the planet under the age of fifty who still loves going to the library.

Desk: Purchased from West Elm. Hahahaa just kidding, yeah right. CRAIGSLIST. Are we seeing a pattern here? The top is some crappy manufactured fake wood thing, but I love the legs. I might make a new top one day. When I've completely run out of other things to do with my life.

Dresser: Craigslisted from a cute couple in the Back Bay. They responded to my email request, they told me, because I said that I "LOVED" the color. And I do! It's one of those things that I would never buy if I saw it in a store, and would never think to recreate the look of, but it feels really perfect with the rest of my stuff in here. We ended up trading road trip tips when I went to pick it up, and I told them which parks in Utah to set aside time for. It was the kind of exchange that warms my cold, dead heart. The third drawer is kind of broken, but still functions, so I ignore it. For now.

Things that nobody other than me cares about: My pineapple lamp from HomeGoods! (Holy crap, something purchased at a real store.) Gallery of vintage-style National Parks post cards were collected on my cross-country road trip. Prints are care of Marc Johns and Berkeley Illustrations and posters are reprints of lovely WPA National Parks designs. Everything else was collected over the past five years from various sources, because I would totally be a hoarder if not for the fact that sustained clutter gives me a panic attack.

And one last thing:

Flock of paper cranes: Frustrated with the soul-crushing boredom of a summer magazine internship I did just before my senior year of college, I took to folding these at my desk whenever I was left without a task to work on. Which was 90% of the time. These have been with me for five years and have survived SIX MOVES, bless their little paper wings.

So that's the bedroom. A couple helpful hints you might never have thought of:

1. Wool blankets make EXCELLENT blackout curtains, and can cost less, too (check your nearest Army Navy store, which will either be sketchy or awesome. Possibly both). This time around, I used pins instead of sewing to create the pocket for the curtain rod so I can still use the blanket if the time comes that I need to purchase actual curtains.
2. That trick with using binder clips on the desk to keep cords corralled? Works like a charm.
3. Rugs are annoyingly expensive, so if you just need something basic and not too huge, sewing together a couple smaller ones is an easy, inexpensive option. In my room, I have two smallish jute rugs that I sewed together with clear fishing line, and since it's a flat weave but still has texture, no one has ever noticed. (Bonus: they were purchased at Kohl's with some of their ubiquitous coupons.)
4. Try propping open your coffee table books (or children's books with beautiful illustrations — I'm looking at you, Leo Lionni) to show off the pages as art. 

The Kitchen: Today

The kitchen has been my arch nemesis since the day we moved in. Ruled by a run-down refrigerator covered in a fine spray of brown rust, it featured walls the color of snot, impossibly placed grease splatters, and an overhead fluorescent light that defied all reason and taste. It had barely any counter or storage space to speak of, and just being in it kind of made me feel dirty.

The good news is that its truly offensive state motivated me to get to work on it immediately.

BEHOLD: The fruition of countless hours of OCD-esque labor and a lot of Craigslisting. (Also, I promise I'll figure out how to take non-shitty pictures of my apartment. At some point. In the future.)

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Repainted the cabinets (as soon as we moved in), trim, beadboard and back door (later) with a fresh coat of white paint
2. Stripped the cabinet hardware (as soon as we moved in) and spray painted it oil-rubbed bronze, along with the hardware on the back door (later)
3. Refreshed the janky refrigerator with a coat of white appliance paint
4. Acquired the kitchen cart in the corner
5. Haggled back and forth at a garage sale for the pièce de résistance, the island*
6. Lined the interiors of the bare, unfinished cabinets with paper**
7. Hung (well, Nathan did the actual hanging part) the ladder spice rack
8. Installed a magnetic knife rack
9. Brought in three stools for hanging out in the kitchen
10. Repainted the stupid, pointless spotlight on the far wall to match the rug (unpictured) that's under the island
11. Installed a towel bar over the gaping hole where the left drawer next to the sink is supposed to be***
12. Removed the 70s light cover and replaced it, for the time being, with a somewhat crappy, homemade drum shade

*I did a lot of haggling because this was the first major purchase I made for the apartment on my own. The guys weren't convinced that we needed an island in the kitchen because neither of them cook, so they didn't realize how necessary countertop space is. Without the cart or the island, the only counter space is what amounts to 1.5 square feet on each side of the sink — half of which is usurped by a drying rack for the dishes. It wasn't until after I brought in the island that Nathan and Andy realized what we'd been missing and, bonus, it provides a bunch of storage space, too.

**The true purpose of the entire cabinet/sink structure is really just to emphasize how much our kitchen was not built to be a kitchen. It's a crappy structure made of poor-quality chipboard and lumber that's probably exhaling splinters and dust particles all over our dishes and pots on a daily basis. I try not to think about it too hard, because when I do, I realize that the bottom half has no dividing walls between the compartments and our pots are brushing elbows with all of our cleaning supplies and their chemical-y goodness. I need to find a solution for this.

***When we moved in, the drawer that is supposed to be there was missing, because the drawer front had apparently fallen off and our landlord was going to fix it. That may or may not have happened, but we'll never know because the drawer has been lost to the chaos that is my landlord's two-steps-away-from-an-episode-of-"Hoarders" apartment. I gave up on the idea of it ever coming back and chose instead to mask the hole with my awesome, acid-green dish towels.

Besides the major additions and changes, adding in all our stuff really helped. Plants, DIY "art," and the ladder spice rack all made a huge difference.

• Vintage cranberry prints (Andy)
• Framed illustration of ducks and food (Ikea bargain frame + page from Edible Boston)
• Virtually indestructible zizi plants and brightly colored pots (Ikea)
• Constellation map (Wrapping paper from PaperSource + Bulldog clips from Dick Blick)
• Appalachian Mountain Club calendar (Nathan)
• Framed photos of food (already-owned Ikea frames + more pages from Edible Boston)
• Ladder for the spice rack (a Craigslist "Free" section find)

All items and decor were either (A) Craigslist finds, (B) previously owned items, (C) DIY creations, or (D) gifts.

The pantry got the same treatment as the kitchen when it came to the built-in storage and hardware, and I ripped off the countertop's plastic sheeting and replaced it with black vinyl contact paper. It's held up surprisingly well for more than a year of use, but it could use some touching up. I didn't touch the pink walls because I was still trying to respect the whole "no painting" rule that's in our lease. My resolve has weakened with every passing day, however, and I feel like any day now I'm going to say fuck it and paint both the pantry and kitchen walls a different, more acceptable (but still neutral!) color.

That's it for now. I still have a lot more I want to do, but at least now I'm not ashamed when people come over, and that's really the important thing, right?