Beautifying Our Place

[May 2011]

We LOVE our apartment! It's so fun to have our own place. It's close to campus, close to Heath's work, plenty big for the two of us, and is such a cozy little basement apartment! It's a great first (well, technically second) home for us! :)

It is an old house, though. A lot of the paint is old and not quite even, etc. Also, there was a flower bed just to the side of our stairs leading down to our front door. We talked about painting the apartment and using those flower beds for flowers and a little garden. A couple months of living here, we were outside of the church after cub scouts waiting for our scouts parents to pick him up (the church is right across the street from us) and we saw our landlords were at the house. So Heath went and talked to them. He asked if it would be okay if we repainted in the house and if we could use those flower beds. She was excited for both of those suggestions! She was excited that we would be willing to paint and said to go ahead and just take the price of any supplies we buy off of our rent. Her son takes care of the yard and so he had just finished pulling all of the weeds in the flower beds and she told us we were totally welcome to plant whatever we wanted to in there. Heath came back over and told me the good news! We were excited to start on those projects!!

 First thing we did was paint! It took a few days, since we were only able to work a few hours each day. We also are just doing one room at a time. The first room we did was the front room, the one we spend most of our time in. It was a lot of fun! And a lot of learning... how to paint best, what looks good, how many coats it needed, etc. We'll be pros when we have our own house! :)

  We didn't really change any colors except the front door, since it's not our home. So we started with the walls and the shelves that are in the room. They were already dark green so we re painted them. There were parts of them that weren't painted at all so we got them even and looking nice. Then, the walls were off white. With it being a basement apartment it's already naturally dark so we wanted to brighten up the room a bit. We painted the walls bright white. What a difference that made!! It really did brighten up the room and made it look really nice!

We moved over to the other side with the front door and painted those walls white and then started painting the door white. The door is so old that the white wasn't really covering up the old paint very well and we decided that it would be a nice touch to paint the door a different color. We couldn't decide what color to paint them so we went to home depot to look at the paint colors and decide. In a paint matching machine we put the color of the curtains that we have (blue) and it picked up the color and gave some suggestions for color schemes that would include that color. One of the suggestions that popped up was that blue, a dark green, and a lighter green. We loved it! The darker green matched the color of our shelves and so we got the light green to paint our door and front window pane. It turned out so great! We love it. It adds a little extra feel to our front room and to the front of our apartment. After a few days our front room looked brighter and better then ever. Our land lady came over a few weeks later and she loves it too! Hooray! Room #1 = success!! :)

Our next project, after it FINALLY got warm here in Provo was to plant! We first got a pot to put down our door and planted some flowers in there and then some flowers in the back of the house (this was before we talk to our landlady about using those flower beds.) Last Monday we decided to fill those flower beds.

We went and got quite a few flowers to put out by the stairs. I think we did a good job at picking those out! We put those closest to the stairs.

Then we had gotten some bricks so we sectioned off a middle triangle to have a little garden. We already had some carrot and cucumber seeds to plant and see how they would grow so they went in that triangle with some beautiful red, white, and purple flowers that my sweet husband gave me for Mother's Day :) in the back! Then we had a little triangle piece left on the right so we dug up the flowers we put in the back and put those there. It turned out so pretty! And it was so fun to do together!

We had a great time picking out flowers and planting them. Chad and Denise drove past as we were doing it and Chad yelled out the window, "Oh, you two are just the cutest things I've ever seen!" Yeah, we're so cute! :) It was great and I love that we can do it together!! Yeah for beautiful flowers - I love them! My husband definitely spoils me - I love them! And I'm so happy it's summer and warm!!

The plants have been doing great! They look beautiful out there and we have cucumbers and carrots coming out too! We're excited to see if we get any veggies from them! :)

It's been fun to be living here and to do some fun projects together around the house. For those who haven't gotten to see our fun, little place here is a little tour for you...

Welcome to the West Home! :)

The Living Room (we know have a wonderful desk where we used to have a chair and then a card table!)

The Kitchen

Bathroom

Extra Room (It used to have a twin bed in it - where Shelby and Kyle lived when they stayed with us. Now it's a craft/music/Heath's closet room! :)

 Our Room (The picture is mainly just our bed but it's a perfect room! Also those are our stuffed animals in the corner of our room. All 4 have special meanings/we gave them to each other while we were dating.)

It's a fun, little place and we love it! It seems we'll be here for a while - probably the time we're living in Utah! It's nice that we like it and that it fits us so well so that we don't have to move for a while! :)