Apartment Therapy

It's no secret that I'm a tab bit obsessed with Apartment Therapy (both the website and the book, which I highly recommend!). I've always enjoyed decorating and redecorating, but once I realized I could start calling it therapy, the amount of time I spent thinking about sprucing up our apartment has me bordering on crazy pants territory.

Which is why I am now proud to say that, after almost four years in our current apartment, we have FINALLY finished painting every room! This wouldn't be nearly as exciting if the previous tenants hadn't painted each room in a hideous shade of ugly and uglier* (I'm looking at you hideous orange-red on the one living room wall!), but they did and so repainting was really just a way of keeping my sanity.

*An aside: not only were the paint colors ugly (butter yellow, skin-color yuck), but they didn't flow at all from one room to the next. You try moving from a mint green hallway to a light yellow guest room to a different shade of yellow plus one wall of weird orange-red living room without wanting to poke your eyes out.

I do not at all miss the yucky yellow and orange-red walls. Along with the top white stripe that we were skeptical to paint over, but are now so glad we did!

My sister's spontaneous visit last month gave us that final metaphorical kick in the ass to finally paint over the ugliest living room walls in existence. Though that opinion is mine alone, as Micha wasn't too disturbed by them. But he does know that when I have my mind set on new colors, you can only postpone the inevitable weekend painting extravaganza for so long. So off we went!

Goodbye blah yellow, hellooooo sultry gray!

We had somehow managed to agree on two colors for the room 1) quickly and 2) quite a while ago. We knew that we wanted our one picture wall--the previously red wall--to be a lovely pinky purple (I know, I know, you still don't believe me that a boy would agree on this one but he TOTALLY did! Almost right away!) My inspiration for this color came from this fantastic bar in my old stomping grounds of Padova, Italy that my sister and I stumbled upon during our last visit there. It had the most fantastic color scheme of pinky purple and lime green with a faux fur leopard print bar! Sadly, I have no pictures, but honestly, who could say no to that?

And we had originally agreed to paint the other three walls white. That is, until a good friend, while visiting, told me that white was just too boring for me. Why not light grey? (gray? I can never decide.) And thus the idea for light grey was born. (Thanks Faralyn!)

If you don't have a German boyfriend (and are still on the market), might I recommend finding one? Because let me tell you, they can tape a wall like no other in the amount of time it takes you to find your roller! And perfectly straight to boot.

Sister, getting her paint on. And rocking a Bon Jovi tee. She was at least twice as fast as me. If I had known this sooner, I would have flown her out to paint all of our other rooms years ago!

It still warms me up inside to see the yellow disappearing...

 We totally could have left it like this and called it modern art.

...aaaaaand the final product! Ok, fine. It really does look pink here. But I swear in real life it looks just slightly more purple...

 

Ta-da! (Ignore my dead tulips, please.)

I love it. It's not at all what I had originally intended, but I'm so glad I took the advice of quite a few clever friends of mine and amended my original ideas. The room feels so fresh and lovely now. And so much more...us. I'm sure most of our friends here will have pretty much the same shocked expression on their face when they see it as they did when they first set their eyes on our lime green kitchen, but by now they're used to the fact that Americans like colorful craziness. And drama, baby, drama!