Come In and Stay Awhile

Seeing how my blog name and the whole reason I got started in loving decorating was to encourage people to stay a while, I figured it only appropriate to actually give you all a tour of our lovely little abode. My husband and I got married a year and a half ago and found ourselves settling into a great 3 bedroom apartment since then. While we don't see it being our permanent residence for much longer (increasing rental rates made that decision easy), we are happy to say it's been the first place we've called 'home' since starting our life together.

Here is the layout of our place, to give you a feeling of where you are in the apartment as you look through the pictures of individual rooms in this post.

Here we go:

When you walk in the front door you immediately face the dining room and kitchen area as seen here:

We love, LOVE that island counter space! I can't tell you how spoiled it has made me when I prepare dinner, am baking, or just working on something that needs a lot of table surface! It's fabulous!

Immediately to your left is this little dining nook if you will:

There's not a lot of space so when we do actually eat around the table, you have to pull it away from the corner in order to let people slide on in, but hey- it's better than no dining space at all!

As you turn immediately to your right from the front door, you can make yourself cozy in our living room.

Don't mind the ginormous TV over there in the corner- we're 'storing' it for a friend while he is traveling internationally. Not really my favorite to have in such a small room but I certainly can't complain when it comes to entertaining friends with it!

Now let's head on back to the hall and the back bedrooms.

I'm not gunna lie: I LOOOVE how much natural light comes in our apartment. It certainly helps on those cold, long winter days to have the sun flooding in, in the afternoons. As you look in this picture, the first door on the right is our bedroom. 

I apologize for the darkness of the bedroom pictures, I took these at night after having cleaned up for company and just haven't had time to take 'day light' pictures yet.

As you can see there isn't much space in the bedrooms, they're all about 11X10 which is why we had to turn our bed catty-corner in order to squeeze 2 nights stands, a full-size bed, and a dresser in the room. My husband is 6'4" and let's just say I think he's a saint to be as patient as he has been trying to squeeze both of us into that bed every night. A bigger bed will definitely be first on the wish list when we find ourselves in a bigger bedroom.  A new addition now though, is a BEAUTIFUL full length espresso framed mirror that we lean against the wall next to the closet. (Pictures to come soon.)

Now let's head over to the bathroom diagonally across the hall. 

A bit on the small size, ahem side but it lets us get the job done. One thing I do really love about our bathroom is the black and white damask print shower curtain. I love damask print (including variations of it) and actually have to try to restrain myself whenever I come across the chance to add it somewhere in our place. So far I've limited it to four places: 

(My cooking apron, the backs of our bookshelf, pin boards in the office, and the shower curtain)

Anyways, I digress. Onto the guest bedroom.

(I LOVE these silly feather, iridescent turquoise pillows!)

This bureau is a beautiful family heirloom from my great-great grandfather. Look at that wood!

And the guest bathroom:

Now last but not least: where the magic happens (well... maybe not... but maybe so), our office!

(My side, complete with a beautiful LCD monitor Josh bought me for my last birthday!)

(Josh's manly side, where he mixes music recordings both he and friends make! He's very talented!)

The Musical Side of the room:

That concludes our apartment tour! I hope you enjoyed and perhaps even felt as though you could come in a stay a while.

Yah that whole blogging thing

So friends, when I said that I would be tweaking my blog- I wasn't joking. I can be a bit OCD about design and projects. I would say I have been my whole life. When it came for science fair board time or when power point first came out, I was the one who obsessed more about the appearance of the presentation than the actual content. Don't get me wrong,  I care about the content a lot but what can I say I love presenting things well.

With that said, take this blog. There are SO many options you have when designing a blog, and while that means you have LOTS of selections it also means the potential for indecision and confusion. It also allows for a great sense of accomplishment once you do reach your desired change or product. Mm hmm.

For example, here a couple screen shots of my WIP (work in progress) of a banner, and these aren't even the really rough ones.

Numero Uno:

Here you can see that the banner is off center. I can't tell you how many iterations I went through to try to get this guy centered. It was only when I stumbled across a helpful link on one of my favorite websites for blog backgrounds that I mentioned yesterday, www.thecutestblogontheblock.com that I finally found the solution. See here if you too have been having trouble centering your own header.

Phew, so once I got that taken care of then it was down to minor tweaking. I decided on my blog name a while ago after I thought long and hard over why I like decor and 'nesting'. I realized I LOVE when people come into my home and tell me they feel like they just came home. Or when they apologize for staying so long but they just felt so comfortable they didn't want to leave. That to me is what makes it fun and worth while.

Anyways, my husband pointed out that he thought this:

perhaps just looked a little too crowded. And even though I didn't like him correcting my efforts (how prideful I know), I realized he was right.

SO I moved my tagline:

And for now, I think I'm content with how things are looking on here... for now ;)

First Post

This is my first post  for my new blog! yay!

After months of debating about titles and whether I should do this or not, I just finally decided to bite the bullet on a Saturday afternoon and go for it!

I thoroughly enjoy creating a blog- picking out the style, the background, the name, the fonts and colors- those are all great! And I will probably find myself making more many more changes. However, there are just parts of the making a new blog process that get a bit stressful, especially when something is wrong or off but you just can't figure out how to fix it. This is where fellow bloggers come in very handy. Through a great website called, www.thecutestblogontheblock.com you can not only find great backgrounds and banners, but also an extremely helpful link of blog secrets that answers all kinds of questions about common blog tweaks. It's fabulous.

So dear friends, if you find yourself wanting to create a blog or have made one but it needs tweaking head on over there and see what you can find!

Talk to you soon!