hey there,
so here's the deal. apartment dwelling is, well, limiting. there's not much you can do in terms of painting, knocking down walls, tearing up carpet and basically renovating the space to make it your own. so instead of trying to figure out what we can change (although, i still do that...) i've started to really try to focus on how i can make the spaces we've lived in work for our family. we have had the opportunity to live in two basements and one tiny apartment in our two years of marriage, so small space living has become the norm for us. so much so that parker was just saying how one of his "must-have" items for our first house is a BIG bathroom because we've had tiny bathrooms in every apartment we've ever lived in.
i'll be 100% honest, if i could, i would have changed something in every single one of our apartments. (and that change for every apartment includes adding wood flooring or wood laminate. i lovvvvve that look & WILL have wood flooring in my future house.) BUT because we were limited on the changes we could make, i've had to learn how to decorate our apartments so that the spaces feel like home.
in our first apartment, we actually really lucked out. it was a basement apartment with amazing natural light and a huge living area. i loved that apartment. i was still learning how to decorate/what style i really loved & honestly, how to say no to things that i didn't actually want. we were very lucky to be given a lot of hand-me-down furniture, which really helped us to simply have furniture, but nothing was really cohesive or quite my style. when we moved from our first apartment, we had to downsize quite a bit because the apartment we were moving into was much smaller than our first apartment. while we loved our second apartment (we got our mack pup while living there!!!), it was actually kind of gross. (cheap apartment living for you. hahaha) we only lived there for three months and didn't do much decorating.
our current space is a basement apartment. we are happy to be here & are grateful to live here. it's taken us some time to really settle in, but we are getting there. we downsized even more when we moved to our current place because it was fully furnished, so we figured it was a good time to part with our hand-me-down furniture. in our current space we have a large living room, a tiny bathroom & a pretty good sized bedroom.
because we are living with my grandma, we really try to respect that it is her home. we can't paint or change out the carpet, so we had to make changes that could easily be changed back when we move out. we've been able to move a few things to give ourselves a little bit more space in the living room in the basement. we already had our egg chair & then we ended up buying a couch to make the room feel more like a living room. we used one of my grandma's coffee tables to help create the living room feel. we also bought a 5'x7' rug to help make the flooring feel a little more our style. because most apartments don't allow you to put holes in the walls, we've become very good friends with command strips. (which we will probably also use when we have our own house because they are so awesome) we hung up our gallery wall pictures that have moved with us from each apartment. the photos we hung are attached to some of my most favorite memories, so hanging them up helped make the basement feel more like home.
i'm still trying to figure out how to decorate our bedroom. it's a pretty good-sized space but i just haven't figured it out yet. but i'll update you when i figure it out!!