New Apartment: Bedroom Before and After Pictures

The adventure blog has sort of been on hiatus this past week, mostly because I’ve been in the process of moving into a new apartment in New Haven.

I also don’t have internet yet, so Michal and I have been at the mercy of neighborhood cafes with free WiFi.

Thank you Cafe Romeo.

I’m pretty excited about my new place, especially since after having lived in both Boston and New York City, it’s an odd feeling to suddenly have so much space (and so much money left over after paying rent!). It will also be nice to officially have my name on a lease with Michal, because living out of a duffel bag was beginning to get old.

Our friends Jesse and Paul will also be living with us, so I’m thrilled that the place will most likely always have people in it. Places always feel more like home when there are voices in the background.

Michal and I are tackling the apartment room by room, so on the agenda for our first weekend in the new place was the bedroom…and this meant the REAL agenda was PAINTING.

White walls sort of horrify me. I’m not sure why, but I’m beginning to think it’s genetic, because in my parents home there is not a single white wall to be found.

Luckily Michal was all for painting the bedroom whatever color I wanted, and since I already had the color picked out (Gentle Tide by Glidden), it was just a matter of dropping by Home Depot to pick it up.

If you’ve painted before, I don’t need to tell you it’s hard work. It took us three days to finish painting and touching up two rooms (we painted Michal’s office too). Because of the fumes we set up the bed in the living room, and lived there for the first few nights.

There was lots of take-out and beer consumed this weekend.

Once we finally finished painting we began moving in furniture.

If Michal looks tired in the above photo, it’s because we were both up at 6am, and in my sleepy state I was a bit indecisive, so I made him help me arrange the furniture in our room about 5 different ways until I finally decided on the set-up I liked.

Once we set the bedroom up the way we wanted, we ran to IKEA to buy some shelving. The shelving was SO cheap and made the room look much more finished.

The bedroom isn’t quite complete, but here are some before and after photos (before photos were taken when we first looked at the apartment).

BEFORE PICTURES:

AFTER PICTURES:

Don’t colored walls make rooms look so much more inviting?

Because the windows in the front of the room are so beautiful, I didn’t want to distract from that with a clunky headboard. I toyed around with a few ideas, but finally decided on installing a simple IKEA shelf directly behind the bed. For the brackets we used the plastic white ones that only cost one dollar at IKEA. From far away you can’t tell they aren’t wood. In total, our “headboard” cost us 7 dollars. It was definitely the cheapest solution to keeping the area between the windows simple/clean, while still giving us a place to store a book, water, or cell phone at night.

We also bought two large shelves from IKEA (7 dollars each). Since this wall is more of a focal point, we splurged and bought the nicer brackets (5 dollars each). So in total, we transformed this wall for 34 dollars.

We were lucky that no major furniture or bedding had to be bought. My only real splurge were the bamboo shades (Bed Beth & Beyond) which were $40 each, and totally worth every penny, because when the sun hits them they glow this beautiful honey color.

There are still a few spaces in the room that need to be worked on such as:

so bare

This house plant needs a buddy (preferably in the form of a mirror)

Not a great view from the bed.

I already have some creative and cheap ideas though, so maybe I’ll update you with photos once I complete the projects.

Someday in the future (way in the future) I’d like to purchase something like this, this, or this, but for now I’m just going to dream about that day, and until then I will focus on decorating my new IKEA shelves with fun knickknacks from my local Marshalls, Homegoods, and TJ Max….which did I mention are all less than 10 minutes away from my new place?

I guess some dreams do come true.