The Apartment!

Hey, everybody!

In true Housing fashion, we thought you'd like to see the place we're living. For the past week, we've been unpacking, filling our shelves with groceries, and doing our best to get settled. This will be a picture walkthrough of the place (minus our bedroom and spare bedroom...you'll get those when Liz finishes the curtains). To set the scene, you'll just have to imagine this apartment being on the bottom floor of an 18-story residence hall (pictures will follow closer to opening the hall).

So...coming into our apartment you have a nice long hallway with plenty of closet space that separates us from the noise. This will also serve as a bowling alley for our nephew, Alec, when he visits.

At the end of the hallway is our gorgeous 1970's (maybe a little older) kitchen. At first, we didn't know what to think, but once we got into it we fell in love with it! It's a bit smaller than our last kitchen, but there is no wasted space--and believe it or not--we still have room to spare.

EVERYTHING is magnetic...how fun! Another feature that you can't see is that there is a door that slides out of the wall to cover the kitchen from the view of guests.

If you take a left from the entry hallway, it opens up into a big space that we mainly use as a living room. We've inherited a bigger television (which is great for ROCKBAND). If you notice in the picture, a drum seat and another guitar have been added. Too bad all our ROCKSTARS are spread throughout the States.
The room's big enough that we also have our dining room in this same space (it is in the corner nearest to the kitchen). We're still making discoveries as we explore our apartment in detail, and we just learned that there is an extension built into the table. Woo-hoo!
After arranging the space, we realized we had an unused corner in the room and an extra piece of furniture. It is a dream come true...we have a reading nook! That's right, we're excited about it.

Off of the living room is a hallway: if you take it straight you end at our bedroom, a right turns leads to the bathroom and a left turn leads to our spare room, where we do our art (which we've missed doing but didn't have the space) and work on the computer (including blog updates).

Our bathroom...gave us some concerns at first. However, Liz was able to do some work and got it to be quite attractive.
We've really been able to make our apartment feel like home, but outside of our apartment, we can tell we're missing our friends and family.

P.S. To those of you working and living in a residence hall as a hall director, get renter's insurance. And if you do that, tell them about all your apartment's safety features. The fact that we have a sprinkler system in every room (including our closets) saved us megabucks.

Tomorrow, my training starts (and it looks like a cakewalk compared to what many of us have already experienced). I'm getting to do the "retreat" thing and have the luxury of completing a high-ropes course. Liz will be holding down the fort, exploring campus, and enjoying a bit too much quiet time.