Making an Apartment a Home

We have lived in our current apartment for over a year now. We moved in when I was five months pregnant and now William is almost a year old. When we first moved in the priority was getting ready for a baby. We ended up with a bunch of stuff I have never used but still can't seem to part with. Tyson and I have saved up our monies to buy a few things to help our old apartment feel like our home.

Item #1: Our bedset. Okay, so we bought this when we lived in our old apartment but it was a sweet deal and it has helped us bring our own style into our home.

Item #2: A rug. We bought a beautiful rug for $400 less than the list price. Woot! It was the cheapest we could find that Tyson still liked to lay down on. The carpet in our apartment is horrendous. Seriously. And with a baby we wanted a space where he could crawl around and not get immediate rug burn. We're still working with our landlords to get the carpet fixed by the kitchen: it's pulling up to reveal the nails beneath. TB anyone?

Item #3: An entertainment center. Well, it's more like a TV stand with some cupboards. I saved all my editing money and we found this stand at Wal-mart on clearance. It's super heavy for Tyson asked some workers for help getting it on the cart. One of the kids (emphasis on kid) said "Aw man, I don wanna lift this" and kicked the box. Thanks for the extra 10% off, kid! We moved the bookcases around and now we have a makeshift entertainment center. Moving it made us switch our couches which actually removes focus from the TV. I like it.

Item #4: We made a fun piece of art with some lace, fabric, and a frame we found at Deseret Industries (D.I.). Tyson is actually super crafty, but he'll never admit it. He came up with the idea to make the background changeable. Right now it looks black but that is because it's on the table. We found some cheapo fabric in all sorts of colors (color of choice right now is blue) that we can switch out per the season or my mood :)

I found a few free printables online that I fell in love with but needed some new frames to put them in. Instead of buying new frames, I used some white spray paint to re-purpose some black frames from our wedding. (At our wedding we had LOTS of pictures in black frames and we had them all hung up all over the place in our old apartment. Now that William is here we wanted to include pictures of him so we've slowly changed out wedding pictures for family pictures. But don't worry: we still have some wedding pictures up. They're too good to put away forever!) I still need to print out the printables and put them up. One is going in the bathroom and I'm not sure yet about the others. (The middle one is a quote from my favorite poem Choose Something Like a Star by Robert Frost. I designed this little print myself. WIN.)

My next project is to turn our kitchen table into this:

Actually, I think my next project will be to recover the kitchen chairs. Right now the fabric is a tan, red, and green plaid that has been there forever. This set was given to us by Tyson's family so it has really been forever. I'm recovering the chairs with a bright happy yellow fabric. After that I will do the table and then I want to make new, non-black, curtains for the kitchen window. Maybe purple flowers or blue something. I don't know yet. I'm waiting for a sale at Hobby Lobby or Joann's.

We'll be in the apartment for the next TWO years (sigh) while Tyson finishes school. We want to make our time here feel more permanent and less...bleh. Ya know?