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Apartment Living: my little boy’s room

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I want to start this post by saying that I hope I don’t come off sounding ungrateful. I am very thankful for the apartments that I have lived in since being married. That being said, I’m sure that most moms out there (and non-moms too!) who are renting are probably often frustrated like I am about decorating in a rental space. When the hubby and I first got married we knew we’d be living in the same apartment for 3 years while my sweetheart finished dental school, so it was totally worth it to us to paint a few accent walls and hang curtains; and I am here to testify that folks, those two things make all the difference when trying to make your dwelling into a cozy home. When we moved, we thought we wouldn’t be in our apartment any longer than a year and it was a brand new building, so painting over brand new beige walls seemed crazy. We hung pictures up all over and put nice decals up in my son’s room and once again, those two things made a huge difference. Which brings us to move #3, in which we only thought we’d be in this (much smaller than our last) apartment for 3 months while we waited for our house to be built. More than half our stuff is in storage, I didn’t hang anything on the wall, and all of our pictures, knick knacks, etc, are packed away. I’m not going to get into details, but we decided not to go through the purchase of our home… which means we’ll be staying in this apartment for about another 6 months and I am in my second trimester… which means I am nesting hard core and trying to cozy up our sterile apartment without having to go through everything in storage or spend $$$ and knowing that we won’t be here too much longer so I don’t want to go through the trouble of painting or hanging curtains. So… that brings us to this post and a few others that I am planning on doing. Don’t expect anything dramatic or amazing, this is an apartment after all, but I figure if I am frustrated with decorating for apartment living than there are probably others out there that are as well and maybe one of you might like one of these ideas and feel a little better about their situation. Some of the really simple things that I have done have made all the difference.

I am really excited about my little dove’s room. Here is the before in which I purposefully didn’t try to clean it up so you could see how truly sad of a space it is:

There were two major problems I had with the room; 1} the walls were so plain, and I hate blank walls! 2} it really bothered me that one of my craft boxes (the huge cardboard box next to the changing table) was out since it was too big to fit in the closet with the other one and I really had no where else to put it.

And here is the after with some simple and inexpensive fixes:

See, nothing too extraordinary, but still sooo much better than what it was. One of the first things we did was hang this cheapo shelf from Ikea. Seriously, I think the brackets were like .50 cents each and we found the shelf in the “As Is” section for $1.99. I had found that giant paper mache “C” (for my little dove’s name) at Joann’s and been waiting for it to go on sale to snatch it up. I decorated it pretty much the same way I did his #1 and then added a little burlap tie since I had some leftover from a previous project. The shelf not only added some visual interest to the wall, but I was able to get the diapers and wipes up high enough so that my little mischief man couldn’t pull them all out anymore! Two birds, one stone, check! The other items on the shelf are just a small jar with some shells from a recent trip to Galveston, and a couple of glass stars that I’ve had forever from Mexico.
I was also really excited when I found my little man’s “Beach” sign in a box I had to go through when I was looking for some other baby stuff; all it took was one nail to hang that little beauty up. And remember that other major issue I had with his room? The ugly looking, random, giant cardboard box full of some of my crap craft stuff? It now sits in the corner where you don’t notice it right away and I also added some Contact brand adhesive shelf liner to the sides that I left over from another apartment project. It actually looks pretty good and that little part of the makeover that makes me so much happier cost me $0, whoop!


The last thing I did was add some faux curtains to the window wall and although it doesn’t add any color to the room, it does add some beautiful and much needed texture. It makes such a huge difference in person, I wish that the pictures did it better justice.  
So, all you apartment dwellers out there, do you get frustrated like I do? Or are you more like my husband who doesn’t “see what the big deal is”?

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