Here are some pictures of our new place. Of course I realized the second we drove away that these photos are terrible and make no sense. Plus I forgot to take pictures of some really important things, like the entire balcony/porch.
Here is a little floor plan drawing of the unit. First thing as soon as we move in, I am going to measure every room and draw up an actual scale floor plan. Then I’m going to cut out tiny little couches and tables and beds and go to town arranging them on my little paper grid. Because I am cool like that.
Anyway, you can see the apartment has kind of an interesting layout – the third bedroom is tucked in the back without direct access to the hallway. You have to either walk through the second bedroom or the bathroom to get out. I’m not sure why it was laid out that way, but I can tell you that every single apartment we looked at had some kind of weird layout quirk…
The apartment is very clean and freshly renovated with new paint and refinished floors, which is nice. The ceilings and baseboards are painted an OK white semi-gloss, but the walls are just a gross yellowish off-off-white. We’re planning to repaint just about everything.
Ok, here is the living room. The window faces east. I think we’ll put the couch on the right against the wall and the shelving unit on the left wall. The whole room, along with the dining room, is going to be painted a nice soft gray, just a touch warmer than the color in our current apartment. I hate vertical blinds, so we will probably pull them permanently off to the side and cover the whole apparatus with curtains. I’m thinking floor-to-ceiling curtains on a hospital track.
And here is the dining room – it is open to the living room and the window faces west onto the balcony. We’ll obviously put our dining table here, as well as the china hutch. The air conditioner will live here in the summer too. I also want to get rugs for the dining and/or living rooms. And the ceiling fan is hideous. The part of me that has lived in Seattle for the past 7 years wants to chuck it, but I know we’ll rely on it to cool the apartment down. Maybe we can replace it with an inexpensive but more attractive model. Ceiling fans aren’t that expensive, right?
This is the kitchen (with a gas stove for Daniel!) We are going to get a stainless steel kitchen work table from the restaurant supply store to go against the opposite wall.
Daniel is so excited to have a bigger kitchen with lots of counter space and cabinets. The upper cupboards are are original 1960s aluminum cabinets. The whole kitchen is that ugly yellowish color but we will probably just live with it for now. What should we put in that weird little corner area (besides the weird grass-filled cornucopia, which is staying, obvs)?
The master bedroom has windows facing east and south and a big double closet. I like that all of the floors, woodwork, and doors are original to the unit. You can’t see them, but the sliding closet doors are the original wood color, which I like so much more than if they had been painted or (horrors) replaced with cheap mirrored closet doors. This place is definitely mid-century.
We plan to paint the bedroom something really dark – either black or deep deep blue. Both the room and Waukegan get so much light that we’re not worried about it seeming like a cave in there. It’s going to look great.
Here is the second bedroom, which will become my office. It also faces south and has the smallest closet.
I’m planning to paint it some shade of gray and then fill it with white bookshelves and a huge white lacquered desk. The closet will become my craft supply storage area. Daniel can have, like, a laptop charging area and a bookshelf. But the rest of the room is all mine.
I’m really excited to have a space all to myself that’s big enough for me to craft and do school work in. I figure, the reason we’re in Waukegan is for me to go to school, so let’s really go all out here and dedicate a room to my studies. In the past, our shared office spaces have just gotten too cramped and cluttered for either of us to work. Plus, Daniel will get a desk at work.
Ok, so next is the bathroom. Compared to our last two apartments, this bathroom is huge. There’s, like, 2 feet of space in between the tub and the sink, and the sink and the toilet. And they didn’t have to cut out a piece of the door to fit around the toilet bowl! I’ve always been proud of Daniel’s and my ability to successfully share tiny bathrooms, but needless to say, this is going to be a nice upgrade.
So the tub is blue and the walls are tiled to half-height in white with a brown border:
In order to pull it all together I bought this shower curtain, which is gorgeous in person.
We’re also going to paint the upper portion of the walls a bright jewel tone green – like a kelly or emerald.
And finally, here is the third bedroom, destined to be the guest room. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do in here yet – it will probably make a pretty good landing pad for random crap for a little while. But we are buying my friend Kaitlin’s bed and hauling it all the way to Chicago, so this room will definitely become a guest room eventually. It just might take a little time.
sarah in chicagoland 
