Auf Wiedersehen #819!

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The Alexander House Apartments in Downtown Silver Spring made a great place to live for two years filled with some big life transitions. First was my move from quaint Charlottesville, VA to bustling Washington DC and starting my first real job after grad school. Almost exactly a year later, Keizo moved to the US, we got married and have spent the past twelve months figuring out how to live in very close proximity to each other in relative harmony. Thankfully, he's easy going and ascribes to the philosophy, "happy wife, happy life." ;-)

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I moved from Charlottesville with only a few big pieces of furniture: a futon, a dresser, an armchair and an outdoor bistro set, so the apartment--all 655 square feet of it--was a little sparse in the beginning. On my first trip to Ikea I bought a desk, shelves and two chairs for the breakfast bar. More trips to Ikea and the purchase of a real bed later, and things looked and functioned much better.

I was smart enough to take some 'before' photos the day I moved in, and then some 'after' ones a month or two before moving out. The 'after' photos were taken on a Saturday when I was feeling grumpy about having spent the better part of a nice day inside cleaning and tidying up. Looking around afterwards, I realized the place actually looked pretty good and it was the perfect opportunity to take photos before we tore it apart packing up to move.

As shown in the floor plan above, all of the rooms connected to one another. The "tour" below skips the kitchen and moves roughly clockwise around the apartment from the front door.

The dining area was just two chairs for the year before Keizo moved in. They barely reached the counter, but when it was just me I didn't care too much. Finding a table to fit in the small space (with the weird offset tiles and light fixture) took some searching; we eventually found one on Wayfair that matched both the chair legs and the wood sideboard we picked up at the local Habitat ReStore.

The living area also had a few different iterations before we settled on the arrangement above. The futon from Charlottesville served as the sofa and set the color palette for the rest of the room: black and white, with a few bright accents. Just visible on the far left of the photo is the desk, which was a perpetual holding zone for papers, catalogs and the odd things that never seemed to get put away. 

Buying a real bed made me feel like I finally made it to adulthood, and I still look back fondly on the first week of good sleep after it was delivered. The bedroom was more than just a place to sleep; it also had to serve most of Keizo's storage needs, as well as provided a place for us to keep our bikes out of the elements. We bought a vertical rack that allowed us to stack them on the wall at the foot of the bed. Off the right edge of the photos was my dresser and the entrance to the walk through closet, which led to...

...the bathroom. Nothing too special to note here; I still like the shower curtain I picked out two years ago at Target, and I have found storage bins to be my solution to many an organizational quandary. As long as you stick to a theme within each bin, and don't fill them to the brim, things are pretty easy to find.

There are just a few things I miss about this apartment since moving about 3 weeks ago. They are:

• the view looking west from the balcony = lots of pretty sunsets
• the dishwasher 
• the open kitchen.

The new place is really nice though, and so far I am loving:

• having more space (two bedrooms, large open living/dining room and 5 closets)
• the "hardwood" floors (the wall to wall carpet in #819 went from off-white to grey despite liberal use of carpet cleaner)
• the spa-like shower head
• ceiling fans throughout.

Currently - September '16

I'm a little behind schedule with this post, but rather excited to share that this is my 17th Currently post since first joining the linkup in December 2014. This month, Anne and Beth are co-hosting, so please stop by to say hello!

Reading – Both our old and new neighborhoods are peppered with Little Free Libraries in people’s yards, and I often stop to browse the offerings. Recently I picked up “Riding the Bus with My Sister,” (non-fiction) and “Yo!” (fiction). The first was a good lesson in empathy and trying to appreciate our differences, while the second was an interesting novel told from several different points of view. 

Trying - A capsule wardrobe (see photo above). In a perfect world, I would have spent time cleaning out my closet before moving, but unpacking presents an equally good opportunity to purge in my opinion (maybe even better, since the memory of all the beautiful, empty space is still fresh in my mind!) I settled on 40 items not including shoes and accessories for my first capsule. Some of my initial thoughts are: there's no way this enough! Will I have to do laundry more often? And right now it's >90* while the end of November is usually around 50*...let's hope it cools down a bit soon!

Hoping – My new bike commute will help my clothes fit better. One week in and it's mostly just making me arrive at work sweaty and even hungrier than usual.

Decorating – Our new apartment! While we have all of the basics and then some in terms of stuff, our new place has more space than our last, so it’s time to upgrade our 2-person counter height table to a proper dining table that will allow for dinner parties, large jigsaw puzzles and various craft projects. It's also time to invest in a proper sofa so we can move the futon into the second bedroom for guests.

To-do listing – Plenty of boring stuff: changing my address in a gazillion places and setting up a long overdue dentist appointment with some fun stuff mixed in: planning my birthday treats at the end of the month.