Living room ... Ready for living!

So although we still have some things that we would love to add to our living room, such as shelves above the couch, a nicer rug, and a cabinet covering the T.V.... to name a few. It's tough when you rent because you want it to be your home, comfortable, clean, cute, functional and portray you. On the flip side... you are renting, you don't know how long you will be there and while making some changes are necessary ... how much time and money should you really put into it? Here is the progress of us making our first apartment ours as inexpensively as possible!

Lucky for us we inherited some pretty great pieces from my mom. 

The table is an antique card table, it is fantastic! it has 2 leafs that open when we have company, and a great little drawer that we keep our pens and paper in! Now because we only have one closet ... and a very small amount of floor space we had be get creative with the chair situation. Thank you bed bath and beyond for having decent looking fold up chairs! They have a lot of options!

Our chair (which will do for now, although when we have a bigger place we will have real chairs) were being discontinued, they were $29.99 each and I had to travel to 3 stores to find all 4 of them, but it was worth it for the price and functionality!

My favorite gift from my mother is Nanny. Yes we named our trunk who doubles as a coffee table, *oooo aaaaahh*! Nanny was named for the Nanny Beckman who owned the trunk in 1908. How did I figure that out you ask ... well we have 2 things, 1. a really awesome ceiling in our apartment which is 15 feet high and original to the building ... beautiful tiling ... you should come lay on our floor and check it out for yourself!! and 2. we have a puppy. Needless to say between those two things I'm on the floor sometimes and one day I noticed the tag (seen below right above the torn New York tag) Barely visible is the name Nanny Beckman and the name Lucania which we found out with some research was a pretty sweet ship back in the day. Nanny Beckman is on the record at Ellis Island for coming from Sweden, through Liverpool and ending in New York. We could find out much more about her but we named the trunk in her honor.

Nanny



Lucania



Another pretty cool thing we stole received from my mother were a few wooden crates. They are from from old apple orchards and such, but have since become our end tables and storage boxes. I love antiquing ... it's sorta a problem of mine but I have found 4 old suitcases that I use for storage, tables and decoration in our living room. All together I paid about $40.00 for them.

So having all those great things to decorate with we had our work cut out for us cleaning up the space. So we scrubbed and painted....

Notice the patch of color! It took forever to find the perfect yellow,
especially since I had my heart set on a red couch

                                           

Found cheap furnishings ... and made them look appropriate :)

                                

  *sigh* MUCH BETTER!!

                                                           

 Here are a few before and after photos of the place we now call home!

First thing we did was get rid of the blinds from the windows .... they were so gross!
Add a $20.00 lamp from TJ Max, Picture frames with photos that spell BRANDT (a wedding gift)
A large clock, that sadly makes too much noise so has been retired and now just looks pretty, from World Market, which is where I also purchased my curtains. Those curtains ... I saw them and fell in love, they were $30.00 a piece but I decided they were a must have, and then I ended up basing my entire living room color scheme around them!

Here is our kitchen table area... it looks so much better than it did but that T.V. ...  the T.V. is currently being fitted for a home. Peter has been working on setting up a nice little shelf unit to hid it, it's wires and speakers, which will be wonderful and provide more table space! (there are 3 speakers and they are always in the way!)

Hello Red couch from Craigs list! Thank you for costing only $40.00
...  and our lovely wall map ... wanna know a secret? It's from Ikea :)
Also please notice our window ... it faces the hallway so the last tenant just boarded it up... interesting... So we freed the window and frosted it :) Bought a new lamp and put up a mail box under the window.

So call me ridiculous but I have never before purchased a floor rug. I had no idea how expensive they are! So after recovering from my near heart attack I took a trip to my favorite store, TJ's, better known to the common folk as TJ Max. TJ's didn't let me down!! I found that lovely floor rug for $30.00 ... pretty good when all the other places I had looked were trying to steal close to $100 from me! rude

And two people in Love and a puppy who loves himself as much as we do, I catch him staring at himself often .. sometimes he even sleeps in front of the mirror so he can wake up to his own face.... ridiculous, and you got a happy little apartment :)