One Year

Guys. It's been ONE year that we've been in our house!!! Can you believe it?! 

One year ago yesterday we started moving in but we actually reached the one year mark of owning our home on September 12th. Let's recap some of the changes that have happened in the last year of home ownership, shall we?

I shared the news that we had officially bought our house and I shared when we moved. 

Our first project (before even moving in) was painting all of the kitchen cabinets.

We brought Sophie home.

We went to Ikea and did a few small projects with Ikea organizers. and purchased some Ikea furniture. We bought some new kitchen appliances from Home Depot.

We decorated for Christmas, bought some new decor, and figured out how to deal with having no pantry.

I made extensive to-do lists for our house interior and the exterior.

I straightened up our office.

We updated our wall decor and bought some cool wall art for our kitchen. 

We installed new blinds- finally some privacy!

I organized some kitchen drawers (check back on Wednesday to see inside all our kitchen drawers and cupboards!)

Some small house updates were made, did some yard work, learned all about gardening, and Tim built a walkway all by himself!

Once that was completed I created some new front gardens. I managed to keep everything alive that I planted! I have been loving having gardens this summer and can't wait to add on next year!

Can you believe we completed all that stuff in our first year here? Tim is currently working on a project right now and I will drop a little teaser picture right here....

Any guesses what we are up to?

Cheers to another year of projects in our first home!

Our Guest Bedroom

Getting real today!

Our guest bedroom is nothing special. The furniture in it is the furniture I grew up with in my bedroom. The mattress is on the floor and it's Tim's old mattress (although super comfortable!) 

I store my vacuum fleet (yes, I have more than one vacuum and I want more...) in this room. The decor is just kind of thrown in there. 

So yes, nothing special. But to be honest we haven't ever hosted anyone in this room. This is a three bedroom house and when we turned one room into an office, we set up the second bedroom as a guest room. Eventually if we have kids I imagine this becoming a nursery. But for now it's just an extra bedroom in case someone spends the night!

When you first walk in the door you see the dresser with the tv and DVD player on top and my vacuum fleet. Also a signed Gronk picture that is making me a little sad lately.

As you can see this was just a typical day where I didn't clean up for you for pictures. #keepingitreal 

Donations and items listed on poshmark were just sitting on the bed.  

I love this ladder bookshelf but there just wasn't room for it in our living room so I stuck it in here. Maybe if we renovate someday or if we move it will fit out in our living room again. Do you keep furniture even if it doesn't work for you currently?

A look back towards the door. So, as I said at the beginning...nothing exciting! But this room is basically filled with things that didn't work elsewhere in our home. 

Do you have a guest room in your house? How often does it get used?

Our Master Bedroom

Today I am sharing with you our bedroom! Again, as I think I said during our living room tour this is what our house looks like right now. Things will change as we update our home, especially if we turn this into our forever home, which is still up in the air!

We chose the biggest bedroom for our "master bedroom" although it is only slightly bigger than the other rooms. All of the bedrooms are quite small but we managed to fit all our bedroom furniture inside this room.

Here is the view when you enter the room...

I am still torn about curtains, I'm not sure if I want them or not. When I see a picture like this I think it looks empty and needs curtains but on a day to day basis I like the simplicity of just having the shades.

When you walk into our master bedroom you see our bed immediately which always holds Sophie's blanket and "Piggy" the stuffed animal pig that Sophie sleeps with every night.

This view is from the closet in this room. I love our Pier 1 headboard and as much as I would love to have a king sized bed someday I would be so sad to not use this headboard anymore! I laughed while looking up the headboard link because I remember Tim commenting on how I made such an expensive purchase. It's on clearance right now so definitely go check it out (it's 50% off currently!) but even when it was full price it's not as expensive as half the stuff we have to buy for the house nowadays. Oh my how things change :)

Our nightstands and both dressers are from IKEA. They have held up really well and are quite sturdy. I love that there are super deep drawers but if I could go back in time I would have purchased the white ones instead of the brown-black color. These show dust SO easily and I think the white would've been a little bit easier to hide dust.

Looking back towards the doorway you can see the closet door and our tall dresser. I love the decor on top of the dresser. I just set a few things on top and ended up loving it! The let's stay home sign has never been so relevant.

Our long dresser holds our tv and some personal care products. I also have two hampers, one for clothes and one for towels, blankets and sheets. I purchased these off Amazon and they are the XL and L size respectively. 

One more view back up the bed. Our comforter was a wedding gift and it's so soft! Our lamps were purchased at Target and are so simple but I like them that way. 

So that is our bedroom so far. Like I said, we will continue to make updates to our home so I'm sure someday you'll see this room and it will look totally different!

Velvet Hangers For The Win!

Earlier this year I purchased a ton of Huggable Hangers for my clothes. It worked wonders but it was an expensive habit. Recently I looked into other velvet hanger options and found Zober hangers which were $45 for a pack of 100, where the Huggable Hangers were $30 for a pack of 40, quite the difference! 

I decided to order a pack of 100 so I could get all of Tim's clothes hung on velvet hangers as well and hopefully create a little more room in our closet. 

I received my box of 100 hangers last night and quickly got to work.

First I took some pictures so show you how crowded those chunky, plastic hangers made everything.

Yes, Tim has a lot of clothes! I think he has more then I do. Honestly, this isn't even all the clothes he has- we have a ton in our guest room closet as well.

These hangers all came nicely in bags- one was broken- but only one so it wasn't too bad!

Here's what it looked like once I put all of his shirts on new hangers...

Look how much more room there is!

I decided I would hang his pants on these hangers as well since they work so great.

Pants are a little trickier and obviously take up more room- but I still think they look great!

Since we can't make any structural changes to the closet I am pretty limited on what I can do and dream of someday having a walk-in closet but I think this change gave us a little bit more room to work with.

Just a reminder- this is what my side of the closet looks like! I think I'll be ordering another set of hangers soon since we still have another closet full of clothes to put on better hangers and I'm pretty sure we will need more once everything comes out of the wash too!

Do you use velvet hangers? What have you done to make your closet work better for you?

My Morning Pickup Routine

Happy Monday everyone!

Today is a happy monday for me since I am using one of my vacation days :)

Since I had the day off I decided to set up the tripod and take some pictures of my morning pickup routine to share it with you! 

Every morning whether I work or not I try to get three things done before I leave my apartment. Let's get real though...sometimes these things don't happen. Our apartment is not always perfect, it's not always clean but when I get these three things done before I leave for the day I know I'm walking in to a picked up apartment.

1. Make The Bed

The first thing I do is make our bed. Sometimes Tim will help me when we are getting ready in the morning. We basically just pull all the blankets up. I don't like to feel tucked into my bed, I prefer to have the sheets loose so as long as it looks neat I don't get fussy with it!

I also fold my pajamas and place them on the bed. This way I'm ready to get in my comfy clothes when I'm in for the night.

2.  Pickup The Living Room

It doesn't take long for us to make a mess of our living room. The pillows get out of whack, the throw blankets end up where they don't belong, and junk just gets left on every surface.

So much junk.

I have a specific order I like the pillows and how I think they look best so I always put them back in their places.

Folding the blankets is a quick way to make the space look better and organized.

This table tends to collect all of our junk. There is always trash waiting to be thrown away, stuff I haven't put away, water bottles, etc..If you can't tell Tim bought me Beauty and The Beast this weekend! Love that guy :)

Once everything is put away though, it looks so much better!

Doesn't that look way better? Much nicer to walk into that after a long day at work then the mess I started with!

3. Dishes

Even if there are only a couple of things in the sink I try to do the dishes before I leave. If I get them all done and in the drying rack it just makes the kitchen so much cleaner looking. 

So, those are the three parts of my morning pickup routine and the three things that help me keep a clean apartment. It usually takes me less then 10 minutes and is such a quick thing to do which has such a big impact.

Getting Organized in 2017: Our Closet Revamp

Our closet was completely packed, completely packed. I decided it was time to go through my clothing and get rid of anything I haven't worn in awhile and anything I knew I wouldn't wear soon. I decided that while I was planning this project I would pick up some Huggable Hangers to create two to three times as much room in my closet! Since buying all new hangers is a little pricey I know this project will take me awhile to complete.

I ended up buying six packs of Huggable Hangers and man did they go quickly!

Here's where I started off, I had a few things in the wash but for the most part this is my closet. There were many items in here that I just didn't feel good wearing and I knew I needed to just get rid of them.

Look how many items I was able to fit more comfortably with the Huggable Hangers! I also donated a ton of items along the way which was great.

I still have quite a few items that need to be transferred onto new hangers, I just need to save up for my next set of hangers!

Although I didn't take pictures of Tim's side of the closet once he realized I was cleaning out my wardrobe he decided to do the same! (I love when he gets motivated to clean up!) We ended up with a ton of hangers between the clothes we got rid of and the clothes we moved onto the new hangers. 

I ended up with two bags of clothes and accessories and Tim ended up with thee bags of his clothes (unpictured). We ended up donating them last weekend and it feels so freeing to have all of those gone! I will keep you updated as out whole closet gets changed over to our new hangers and we gain more room. I will also keep you updated as I organize other areas of our apartment this year!

Apartment Living: Our Bedroom

Our apartment is slowly coming together! I spent a good portion of the week working on apartment decorating and organization. I have been really enjoying working on the apartment. As much as I loved decorating and browsing through Pinterest in the past I never knew I would enjoy it this much. 

Today I'm sharing our bedroom which I wanted to be a calming place. I tend to get really anxious and knowing that I can walk into a clean, uncluttered environment at night makes me feel better. I wanted a simple room where I can just relax and that's exactly what our bedroom has become.

Our bedspread and sheets are simple ones from Target. I love the bedspread so much, it is definitely one of my favorite purchases we made, so simple but beautiful! The headboard came from Pier 1. It was a pricer purchase but one I think makes the room and we will have forever. It is part of the Hayworth collection from Pier 1. The two nightstands are from Ikea and were items that we built. I have been loving them for being so roomy as well as great looking. Our bedside lamps are from Target which are super simple but do the job.

Both of our dressers are from Ikea and Tim built them entirely on his own. I've been keeping the decor very simple with only a few items out on top of the dresser. The tall dresser holds only one of our tvs. The other dresser holds my perfume tray, our deodorants, a couple of pictures, and a vase full of shells. You'll also see a pile of Tim's clothes peeking out from around the corner...living with a boy is never dull!

I am very pleased with how the room turned out. Eventually we will have pictures hanging on the walls and the room will be complete!

I hope you are enjoying seeing bits and pieces of our apartment and I will be back with other parts of the apartment soon!

We Bought A Couch!

The title of this post may be a little misleading because we bought more than just a couch on Sunday however I find that to be the most exciting part!

We started our day at Ikea...

Tim had never been to Ikea before so it was a first time experience. Tim kept finding everything green within the store, so quite a few of these pictures are just of him finding green things!

As I said.. Anyways, we spent some time walking through the room displays. It is nice to see everything set up as rooms so you can get different decorating ideas. It took us about an hour to get through the entire walk through.

We saw this awesome picture that we both loved, but didn't end up purchasing it. We may have to still get it though :)

We also picked up a puppy stuffed animal for Tim's sister at her request.

We also both loved this light, it would be so cool in a modern space.

We survived our first Ikea trip together! They say that's one of the biggest tests in a relationship...a trip to Ikea and we did it!  Although we had a little confusion because for the two dressers we bought we needed multiple boxes and were not good at following instructions. We ended up waiting in a long line and then having to go back into the warehouse to get the boxes we needed and stood in line yet again.

We needed two carts (one for boxes and one for our smaller items) in order to get everything out of the store.

Here's the furniture we picked up...

We grabbed TWO dressers from the Hemnes collection- one long and one tall. Although these pictures are in two colors we ended up going with the black-brown for both. They have not been put together yet so I can't speak for how easy or difficult they are to build but I love the look and the drawers are super deep which is awesome!

We also picked up two nightstands from the Hemnes collection. Once again in black-brown and they will be great on both sides of our bed!

After grabbing those furniture items and a few small things from Ikea we headed off to Jordan's to look for a couch! We decided to take part in the Penant Fever and if the Red Sox and Yankees play each other in the pennant we will be getting our couch for free! So as much as it pains me to say it, please cheer for the Yankees to get slightly better. Please and thank you.

So here she is, our beauty!

We weren't really sure what we wanted going into our shopping trip but we ended up really happy with our choice! After some financing and signing up for delivery we were the proud new owners of a couch that will be delivered May 28th! 

So that's our furniture shopping adventure from Sunday! We are signing our lease in a couple of days and there will be so many updates along the way I can't wait to share everything with you!