The Apartment Before...

Hello again!

Back to write a new post since I can't snuggle Reggie today.  Tonight, Steve and I are going to a party with some of his work friends and, since Reggie has been having some very putrid gas today, I can't snuggle my boy.  Oh, well!  A good reason to do something productive.  But seriously, they smell like hard boiled eggs.  Bleh...

Now that you're thoroughly disgusted, I thought I would share some better news with you. We officially have most of our stuff unpacked.  As a matter of fact, we only have one small box of random stuff remaining and a pile of things we've put on Craigslist that are waiting to be purchased.  That means that it is almost time to put up pictures of our home for you all to see. But first, I thought it pertinent to give you some before pictures so you can see what we were working with and what a masterpiece I turned it into.  Yes, I know.  Save your applause until the end please. 

So, here we go.  When you walk in the front door, this is the view you see: 

The doors straight back open onto a small deck that is supposed to have two Adirondack chairs but the landlords have not yet given them to us.  In fact, according to our lease we can only have those two chairs out there so we can't even move something else onto the porch.  But, once we have them, it will be a nice place to sit.  It overlooks that parking lot but gets the sun in the morning so we like it anyway.  To the left is a little dining area and to the right is the kitchen and washer/dryer room.  Here's the dining area: 

If you were to stand in the living room and turn to face the front door, this is what you would see: 

And here's another view of the kitchen: 

The door that was on the left in the picture before this last one is the washer/dryer closet.  It's actually more of a little room but I won't bore you with a picture of it.  To give you the idea, though, it has the washer, the dryer, and a shelf on two walls about 6 feet high that holds some of our laundry supplies, our recycling, and some of our small kitchen appliances.

This next photo is the view of our bathroom.  If you were to walk into the apartment from the front door, take a right after the kitchen island, and walk straight back you would hit this bathroom: 

It's a pretty nice little bathroom.  We like that we have two sinks and a large linen closet.  The only problem is a slight lack of hot water.  In fact, I tried to fill up the bathtub once and you can't even fill it halfway before you run out of hot water.  It has been training us to take much shorter showers, however. 

And finally, if you walk in the front door, turn right after the island, and turn left as soon as you pass the living room, you would find yourself in our bedroom.  It looked like this before: 

Though it looks slightly different now, I can tell you that a few things have not changed.  For example, do you see that black blob in the lower left hand corner of the picture?  That's a fleece blanket that Steve had been tacking up over the windows before I moved in.  Unfortunately, that blanket is still functioning as our curtain in the bedroom for as we don't have any other curtains yet that are long enough to cover the windows and dark enough to drown out the floodlights that are scattered throughout the parking lot.  So, we've kept the blanket up for now.

We have a few other little areas in the apartment including a utility closet, a small hallway to the bathroom, and a walk-in closet in the bedroom.  We'll try to put those pictures up when we get the "after" post of this "before" up. 

Until then, here's a sneak preview of the finished place.  What you're seeing is Reggie sitting in his favorite place.  From this position, he can watch out the front patio doors into the parking lot and bark at whatever residents, garbage men, and workers are out front that day. He's not so used to being able to see what's going on outside but he seems to like it. 

Hope you enjoyed that little tour through our new apartment.  Can't wait to share the finished pictures with all of you!

Amanda and Steve (and Reggie)