The First Apartment Book: Cool Designs for Small Spaces, by Kyle Schuneman with Heather Summerville, photographs by Joe Schmelzer (2012)

Apologies for the lack of posts lately –I just moved!

I’m still living in the same city as before. I’m actually still on most of the same bus routes. According to GoogleMaps, I only moved 540 m, or just over half a kilometre (which is about a third of a mile, for any Americans reading).

But it’s my first-ever apartment all to myself! I’m sans roommate, and all the decorating choices are up to me. This is fun and exciting but also kind of overwhelming. It didn’t help that my previous roommates were actually the owners of most of the furniture, so I had to make a lot of decisions and purchases pretty quickly when I moved in — basically all I owned in terms of furniture was my bedroom set. No couch, no chairs, no tables, no dining room furniture, none of it.

Family members donated a few lamps and bookshelves, along with some other odds and ends. I scavenged a few more items off kijiji, and made some brand-new big-ticket purchases (a couch! a chaise!). Starting to feel like an adult. Well, I’ll feel like more of an adult when my couch is actually delivered and in my living room.

But then there’s still all the other decisions — what colour to paint? How to arrange the furniture? What to do with all my tchotchkes? I borrowed a number of decorating books from the library, particularly focusing on “small space decorating”, and this book was one of the best.

I found that a lot of the books should have been categorized as “small space decorating for people who just built their own house” or “small space decorating for people currently designing their own house”, or just “small space decorating for rich people”. This book was one of the few that really focused on the reality of moving into a 600 sq. foot apartment in a 30-unit building built in the concrete-crazy ’60s where everything is beige and you’re not allowed to knock down any walls or change the light fixtures or do anything permanent. Ahem.

The First Apartment Book had some really novel decorating ideas, and it illustrated them with essentially a bunch of case studies — different people in different size apartments, in different cities, on different budgets, with wildly different senses of style. There were instructions on how to paint patterns on the walls, how to slipcover your boring couch or dye your own fancy curtains, creating your own artwork or art installations with your own collections or a series of found objects. There were lessons on thrifting furniture and decor pieces, refinishing furniture, arranging the furniture in a room, arranging flowers, what to do with odd corners or strange spaces in your apartment. Plus lots of very nice pictures.

I haven’t actually done a lot of decorating yet; I’m waiting for my couch and chaise to show up before painting, which seems counter-intuitive — why not paint when the whole room is empty? — but I want to get a handle on how the colours are going to influence everything around it before I decide what I’m going to paint. (The couch and chaise are bright yellow, by the way.)

But I’m getting there! And it’s all in my little home of my own.

Explanations/Excuses for Absence

So I actually just moved! Not across the country or anything, but from the suburbs into the city. I’ve been taking some time to get settled in, buy furniture, etc. Not that I’ve not been reading. I’ve read a bunch of decorating books over the last few weeks. They were mostly okay, although they all kind of run together in my mind now. Some were more DIY and realistic and others were for, like, mansions. Which I obviously have not moved into. (Just a decently-sized apartment.) When my new library card from the city library comes in the mail, I’ll be sure to stock up again! It’s long past time for me to get my hands and eyes on a new book.