The Process of Settling In - Shopping Edition

I loved your comments on yesterday's post, dear readers!  It's so fun to see what stage of home-ness everyone else is in, and it sounds like many of you are near where I am right now.  So, even though this isn't the post I drafted on Saturday to publish today, I think it's a perfect opportunity to talk about the stages of decoration that we and our homes go through as we grow up and settle in.

But since I'm sure you're burning with curiosity, let's start with the floor plan of my new apartment!  The whole thing is 675 sq ft and, though the image below isn't to scale at all, it might help you imagine the space to know that the living/bedroom area is 22' x 12' in real life and the dining room is 5'3" wide.  It's on the ground floor from the entrance, but that wall of windows on the right (the north side, actually) looks out over Rock Creek Park and the zoo as if I were on the third or fourth floor because the neighborhood is super hilly.

Back in June, when I first returned to DC, we all agreed that I'd live in Mom and Dad's house until Jon moved to America in late spring 2014.  In that plan, I fantasized about eventually finding a place big enough for the both of us plus Charlie, a grown-up apartment with a lease that lasted longer than a year that we'd gradually fill with investment furniture and artwork.  My first real apartment in DC would be our apartment; it would be the home in which we nurtured the seeds of our marriage and allowed our new relationships and identities to blossom.  The reality of living with my parents, as wonderful as much of it was, destroyed most of those dreams.  Since Jon won't be moving to the States for another year, I've now signed a lease that expires in May 2014 on a studio that I can afford by myself.  The one dream I held on to was that my new apartment would have furniture and accessories that would be worthy of a working adult who is celebrating her 5 year college reunion next month.

You can guess how long that lasted, right?

Because I'm not moving into the new apartment from my own place, I don't actually have anything significant to bring with me.  All of the furniture I bought in London was sold to my landlords for the next tenant, and since I moved back to DC I've been enjoying the bounty of the 20+ years my parents have lived in my childhood home.  I imagined my new apartment as a blank slate, an opportunity to start fresh, stylistically, and to build my own home organically.  I didn't see the point in spending money on anything temporary - in my mind, that meant anything that wouldn't come with me to the next apartment, the one I'd share with Jon.  I'd stick with the basics until I could afford what I wanted, I thought, and then I'd slowly build a collection with lots of input from Jon because, obviously, he'd have to live with the pieces we chose for years to come.

Again, I'm sure you can guess how long that lasted.

It turns out that almost every item of furniture is basic when you're outfitting a studio apartment and it turns out that I don't have the time to wait until I find exactly what I want before I acquire most of the things I'll need.  Fortunately, Mom and Dad have a few pieces stored in their house that they're happy for me to take, and, though I was kind of a brat about hand-me-down furniture at first, I really am grateful.  It's exactly what I need to tide me over until I can develop a style and the savings account to match; actually, given everything they're passing along, there isn't much else I urgently have to buy.

So where did we go to pick up the last bits and pieces?  Ikea, obviously, and I cannot tell you how much I wanted to be past the phase of my life where shopping at Ikea is a given.  The thing is, I'm realizing that we never entirely grow out of Ikea.  As a commenter on an ApartmentTherapy post wrote a few years ago, "Ikea products are a symbol of being grown up enough to finance and furnish your own place and to have the foresight to choose items you might actually want to keep longer than one school year!"  There is some really nice stuff at Ikea, and once I got over my own snobbery I found exactly what I need to plug the holes in my apartment.

I did also pick up a few things from Craigslist, but they were mostly basics.  DIY and other decor blogs make it look so easy to unearth hidden treasures from unsuspecting sellers, so I like the idea of decorating from online forums, but I'm afraid that most of this aspect of settling in will have to wait until I have some more disposable income.

So that's where we are now!  I'm still grabbing small pieces from Target and Bed Bath & Beyond, but I'm mostly ready for my new apartment.  Well, except for the packing...

Wish me luck, dear readers, and please do let me know if you have any tips on making a new house a home!  If you want to see where I'm finding ideas, check out my Pinterest boards - here's one of the inspirations I'm loving right now:

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