We don’t own our apartment, we rent it. I feel I need to write this every so often as a reminder that I don’t have complete control over the design of our place. I have to work with what came with our apartment as best as I can. Don’t get me wrong, the bones of our apartment are good, but for the most part it’s restrictive. Especially when you have a blog that’s all about design and DIY. Trust me, if we owned this place, it would be wearing a velvet cape and lasers would be shooting out of its eyes.
Anyways! In recent months, I’ve gotten a bit ballsier. We live here. I have projects I’d like to do in our apartment and stuff I want to hang up, so I’m going to go ahead and do that. Well, really uninvasive projects. I’m not ballsy enough to start knocking down walls.
One such project I had in mind was to create a repurposed bedside light for our spare bedroom. As the bedside table is so small, I wanted a light that wasn’t taking up valuable table top real estate. Maybe I could hang a light from the ceiling … of course! What’s even better, I managed to make it out of a recycled vacuum cord. Boom.
And I have to say I’m de-
lighted with how it turned out [sorry / not sorry]. A streak of exposed industrial style lighting to offset as well as compliment the calming pink accents. And of course, I have a tutorial lined up next week for how you can DIY your very own recycled light!
UPDATE – see my vacuum cord pendant light tutorial here!
Regarding the rest of the room, below is a little panoramic tour as I realised I’ve never shown anything other than one corner of the room. And I do mean a little tour as it’s a small room …
I attempted to add a gallery to one of the walls. We’ve lived in our apartment for five years now and we have a scarce amount of pictures and artwork hung up, so I’m practicing in here. I hung the most calming and peaceful pieces in the spare bedroom; some of the weirder and darker stuff I’ve kept for the rest of our apartment as the last thing I’d want is a guest to be weirded out by something we have hanging on the wall.
This wall is also a work in progress – anything leftover from updating our bedroom will be hung up here and added at a later date.
The narrow white shelving unit above houses our DVD collection. It’s not very wide so it doesn’t get in the way of the bedroom door.
My first attempt at yarn art is up! Again, I kept the yarn colours calm and neutral. If this were anywhere else in our apartment it would probably have black or red yarn. But, guests. It’s not good if your guests want to hide. This is another work in progress as I might add more yarn.
Another small update I made was to the window. I added a longer curtain rod to extend the curtains all the way to the walls. It makes the room look a bit more finished as well as covers the unsightly vent. And it looks all hotel curtainy. I love hotel curtains!
I showed husband the completed room yesterday evening. He looked around for a good while and finally said, “I’m actually jealous this isn’t our room” and walked out. Seal of approval I’d say! I can’t wait to work on our bedroom and get some artwork and a bit of attitude up.
And to anyone that’s stayed in our spare bedroom up until now, I’m sorry. You are more than welcome to come back now that it’s a proper room with a bit of character! Give give me a couple hours notice to buy in some breakfast. xx
