Category: At Home

Improvised Guest Room

Last winter, my mom came to visit me! That’s right, she came to stay in my cold, one-bedroom apartment on purpose. That’s how much she loves me. In order to reciprocate and make her as comfortable as possible, I rearranged my dining room into a makeshift guest room for her. After the photo, there’s a description of my dilemma. Any words of encouragement or ideas will be welcomed with open virtual arms!

Warm and welcoming. You too, can stay here if you don't mind a twin mattress on the floor :) Truthfully, it is an extremely comfortable bed.

I folded down the leaves of my dining room table and shoved it against the wall, covering it with an “attractive” tablecloth and stashing paint cans and storage boxes underneath it. This left most of the room available for the current arrangement.

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Now for the long story. The dining room has been, ever since the wedding, where stuff crawls in, gets “stored” behind the piano and won’t be seen until we move into a larger place with more storage. That said, it’s kind of a catchall room and while I try to make it usable for dining every once in a while (it’s in the name of the room after all), it’s the room we don’t talk about and hope our guests ignore.

This is unfortunate because we have a piano in there, a sweet dining table my aunt brought up from Texas for me, and a useful hutch that came with the apartment (it has been filled to capacity). If I could get rid of all the “extra” stuff it would be a great room.

Thrifty Thursday

Thursdays, instead of working during the day I work in the evening. This means that I get to adventure during the day and look for awesome finds like this one I’m SO PUMPED about!

Looking for shelves, I went to our local “creepy” thrift store. I found some runners-up but nothing perfect. Then I ventured over to the “transfer station” otherwise known as the dump. They have a shed (“re-use center”) where people leave stuff in hopes that one man’s trash will become another man’s treasure.

TREASURE INDEED!

Have I built it up enough yet? I thereby present to you:

The Wurlitzer 200!!

All of the keys work and it sounds amazing. I grabbed it assuming it didn’t work and was excited about it for the decor factor. A friend of mine who was at the reuse center the day before said that it wasn’t there Wednesday. Clearly I was in the right place at the right time.

Yeah, that’s a picture reused from Friday’s living room tour. Doug already took it to band practice (before I could get some close ups for the blog) so who knows when I’ll see it again.

He's more excited about it than I am... Photo credit to Adam and instagram

Our friend Adam found one in great condition on ebay for over 2 grand. Ours is pretty banged up but I’m still excited about such an amazing score!

The Big [Living Room] Tour

As part of my effort to get the whole apartment properly documented for my home tour page, I got myself all psyched up this week about my living room–the room I’m proudest of in the whole place. I hope I got you psyched up too, because I really want positive affirmation questions or comments below.  Earlier this week I put you in my Delorean and sent you back a year so you can see where I started. As I said before, a lot of things are the same as they were back then (furniture layout mostly) because it works, and I like it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?

Unfortunately in this apartment more things are broken than not. But more on that another time…

For now, it’s picture time. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. The moment I’ve been tidying up my living room all week for.  Because I’m running out the door for work (great time management, Stace) I have put it in slideshow format. If you’re curious about anything be sure to put it in the comments and I WILL answer it!

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[Off topic. If that Delorean on ebay is only 9k, WHY don’t I own it?!?!]