Our Apartment: Three Years Later

Honestly I've been putting this post off for awhile. As of May we have been in our apartment for THREE years! I was hoping that we would have found a house and would be out of here by now but I am trying to live day by day and making this the best place as possible while we are here. 

There isn't a whole lot that's new but I want to keep a log of what this apartment looked like each year we have lived in it. I wish I had more pictures of my bedroom growing up because it's so cool to see how your style and spaces change. 

If you want to see our apartment a year ago at two years you can click here. Ahh the days of our guest bedroom being storage for wedding supplies :)

For our one year apartment tour, click here.

To see when we first moved into our apartment, click here. 

Now for what it looks like now!

When you first enter you'll see our kitchen straight ahead. 

It's a pretty simple room and extremely small for cooking anything other then basic meals. I can't wait to have a larger kitchen so we can actually use all the gifts we received for wedding.

Whiteboard Calendar (similar)
Trash Can
Rug

Dish Towels (I couldn't find the exact ones shown- but they are KitchenAid)

Rug (see above)

Microwave 

To your left you'll see our living room. This is my favorite room in the apartment, it's so cozy and there's seriously nothing better then just lounging on the couch all day on Sundays. 

The only things that are new in here are the table I bought recently and a few decor items!

Ladder bookshelf (similar)
White Bookshelf (built by my dad)
Home sign (local store called Simple Pleasures)
Entryway furniture 

Coffee Table (from Kohls- no longer in stock)
Entertainment Center
Baskets

White Table (At Home)

Couch (Jordan's Furniture- Bargain Area)

Our "dining room area" isn't used as a dining room. We keep my big desk filled with office supplies, my Alex drawers, my jewelry armoire and a small table with kitchen supplies in here.

This is also the room where we collect recycling and store water bottles. 

Jewelry Armoire

Desk (Cardi's Furniture about 20 years ago!)

Alex 9 Drawer

Console Table (Target- no longer available)

Our bathroom is very small but we don't need anything bigger right now. 

I love our bedroom. It's the perfect calming place to get a good nights sleep. 

Bedspread
Nightstands

Long Dresser
Tall Dresser

**All our Ikea bedroom furniture is in the black-brown color and if I could go back I would've gotten the white. Ours shows SO much dust!!

Our guest room holds all of our extra stuff it's a mismatch of stuff we don't know what to do with. Both the dresser and nightstand are from my childhood bedroom, the mattress was Tim's.

Right now the bed is holding everything we need to get rid of and the laundry baskets are full of clothes that are ready to be washed!

That's it for my three year later home tour! I hope you enjoyed it and hopefully next year at this time we will be in a house!

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about where anything is from!

Apartment Living: Decor Updates

Yesterday one of my main concerns was getting bedside table lamps to replace the old ones by our bed and a frame for our guestbook. Along the way I found a few other things I didn't know I wanted until I saw them....

I started the day going to HomeGoods but they didn't have two of any lamp that I really loved and no frames that were big enough (24x36) for our guestbook. From there I ventured on to AC Moore and Target and think I came home with great stuff.

Here's my pile when I got home. I am one of those people who insists on carrying everything in at once. No second trips for this girl right here!

The first thing I picked up was completely unplanned but when I saw it on clearance I was excited for the subtle change it would make in our bathroom.

We had a blue bath mat here which didn't really go with the shower curtain. I swapped it for this $10 white one that came from the HomeGoods clearance section and am loving the small change.

I took a quick look in the pillow section and found a set of two that I thought would look great on my couch.

The gray color works well and it's a larger version of the same design we have on the pillows that came with our couch.

I am so glad that we were able to get rid of the blue pillows that once at here. They were totally destroyed and we desperately needed an upgrade.

When I walked into AC Moore I didn't realize that they were having a liquidation sale. Everything was 25-80% off and it was insane in the store. I was mainly in there for a frame but managed to find this G that has waves on it. I was looking for a G for our living room decor for awhile now but never could find one I liked but this one is perfect! It goes with our decor so well.

This is the old broken lamp on my nightstand. Mine no longer worked so it was just there to match the one of Tim's side. I am not a fan of the gold at all and really wanted a white lamp, so that is just what I got!

I love how simple and clean this is! I replaced Tim's too but I didn't take a picture of his side of the bed.

Last but not least, our guestbook!

Our guestbook from our wedding is 24x36 making it difficult to frame. It's also made of wood so it's difficult to get it in a frame with the backing. I considered getting it custom framed but I didn't want to spend a ton of money. Since frames were 50% off at AC Moore I decided to just grab one and give it a try. The back unfortunately wouldn't fit on correctly but the guestbook itself fit perfectly inside the frame.

I used my hot glue gun to glue all the fasteners to the backing since they wouldn't fit in like normal.

The back stays on nicely but I am nervous to hang it by the back so I ordered some wall fasteners from Amazon which will be coming on Tuesday and we will get it hung on the wall!

That's what new decor-wise around here. Have you picked up any home decor lately?

Apartment Living: Updating The Walls

I finally got motivated to update our apartment walls! 

I had quite a few pictures from our wedding and honeymoon that I wanted to display. 

This frame was given to us by Brittni for Christmas and it took me a long time to get it put up! I ordered pictures off the Shutterfly app, did you know that you could order pictures for free? You just pay shipping for each order which is great. This frame is now on the wall in our guest room.

I ordered this canvas from CVS. There was a great deal and I got this 11x17 for only $12! I hung this up in our middle room.

The last place I updated recently was our gallery wall. This is our "adventure wall" where I like to display pictures of us in places we've explored. Now that we went to five different islands for our honeymoon I had a lot more places to display. This wall always makes me want to go more places!

Have you updated your wall decor lately? I'm running out of walls to decorate! I still need to hang up our guestbook but that involves bringing it to get custom framed!

Spring Cleaning: The Living Room

Let's chat about spring cleaning the living room! 

Our living room is pretty massive but fortunately the living room is a pretty easy place to spring clean.

Here's what I did to accomplish a clean living room (can you see exactly where I was sitting right before I took this picture? Totally forgot to move the pillows back into place before I took the picture!)

The first thing I did was start by doing any dusting that needed to be done. Since we live on planet Earth and deal with gravity it's always best to work from top to bottom. I dusted my pictures, all the furniture, and moved around everything in order to get everything wiped down.

I vacuumed the couch, folded all the blankets and rearranged the pillows.

I don't have the ability to get my windows washed on the outside being on the top floor of an apartment but I make sure that the inside is squeaky clean. This is a great time to also wipe down your blinds and wash your curtains.

Decluttering is also important. I regularly go through these baskets and keep the clutter in this room to a minimum.

Our living room also serves as a mudroom for us. This is where we take off our coats and shoes when we get home. I put all the heavy coats away in our front hall closet and pulled all my boots off our shoe mat and brought them to my closet for the summer.

Once everything had been dusted, cleaned and decluttered I did a thorough vacuum job of the entire room. This is a great time to move furniture and vacuum behind and underneath everything.

Have you finished your spring cleaning yet?

Home Additions

I am all over the place lately! This week expect another post on Friday in lieu of this past Mondays post. I try really hard to keep to a blogging schedule but since this is simply my hobby I don't always have time!

Today I want to show you a few new additions to our apartment. Our house hunt has been going veryyyy slowly and initially I was not purchasing anything for the apartment but then I decided since we weren't going anywhere right away I needed to make our space work better for us.

The first purchase was from At Home. This past winter I picked up two aloe plants and they have been just sitting on the floor under the window. I finally gave in and purchased this to hold my plants. The planter in the center was also purchased from At Home a the same time as the table. The other two planters were purchased from the Target Dollar Spot and I love how they look all together. I love that this table is plain and works with our furniture no matter what room it ends up in.

I always just draped the blankets over our couch and was getting sick of that look so I picked up this basket at HomeGoods. I love the look of it and it holds 4-5 blankets which is perfect. 

Lastly I picked up this oil diffuser from Vasseur Essentials and it looks gorgeous in our bedroom! I also picked up the day and night kit with tons of different oils. 

What have you picked up for your home lately?

Spring Cleaning: My Beauty Products

Today we are talking about decluttering beauty and personal care products. I keep most of my products in my Alex 9 Drawer system that I purchased at Ikea. Unfortunately, this drawer system became overcrowded and I started storing items in my linen closet as well. I would like to eventually get everything into this drawer system but I have stockpiled quite a bit and it won't all fit at this point.

So let's get started!

This system fits nicely in our middle room. Our apartment has a weird "dining room" that we don't use as a dining room. We have a desk in here as well as my Alex 9 drawer, my jewelry armoire, and then some kitchen storage on the opposite wall. It is definitely utilized as a multi-use room but has worked for us so far.

The first thing I did was take pictures of all of the drawers in their original state. 

Everything was pretty messy and honestly there was lots of samples that were super old and had never touched. I was surprised by the amount of stuff I managed to get rid of.

After using my Mrs. Meyers mint multi-surface cleaner and a Makers microfiber cloth to wipe down each drawer I put everything back in neatly.

I managed to get almost everything on the top into drawers which was great!

So much better!

If you are interested in seeing the process and all the stuff that I got rid of you can check out my Youtube video.

What is on your spring cleaning list?