My attempt at interior decorating (apartment style)

I've been in a redecorate your house kind of mood. If I owned a house, I would be painting and buying furniture (theoretically). But renting, it makes no sense to buy new furniture and I can’t paint.  So I shampooed my living room to make me feel better and did a couple little projects that both cost me $0. 

Notice there isn’t much wall space in my kitchen except for that little square above my range. Ignore the radio that’s probably 15 years old and was my brother’s when he was a teenager. There’s even a tape cassette of his still in it. I have to have a radio in my kitchen. Yes, all the stations I like to listen to I could live stream from my computer on the other side of the room, but I like the tactile experience of flipping the radio on and turning a dial to find a station.  I want to find a cute vintage looking radio (maybe red) to go there, but I’m worried it wouldn’t pick up stations as good as the one I have. Anyway, I’m getting side tracked. The point of my project was just to try something in that space. I don’t want something really nice to go there because it is the back splash area and there will be food and grease splattered right there.

From the idea of doing things on blank canvasses, which canvases are expensive, I just grabbed a cardboard box that canned vegetables come in.

I covered it with Dollar Store contact paper I had from some other project. That was a little too boring for me…

So I got my paint out and made it modern art.

Here’s that space now. I don’t know if I will keep this forever. Even though it looks fine, I know it’s a cheap piece of cardboard box and that will bug me. I do know that I like those warm colors in my kitchen and that I like something about that size above my range.

 

The other project I did was in my bathroom/laundry room. It had been a bathroom/laundry/storage room. I took out all of Colin’s tools (still not sure where those will go) and other junk. I had a broom skirt with Indian patterns I loved, but  it had some problems so it wasn’t wearable. I cut out some of the different elephant patterns and put in a frame I had. I covered the frame with the fabric using hot glue.

This picture makes the colors look really orange—my walls aren’t cream, they’re white-white. The colors in the fabric are red, cream, navy blue, and orange.

I had a really skinny space above the toilet so I took some paintings I did in college (history of creativity final project) of sacred mountains and hung them on a piece of the same fabric, like when you hang pictures on ribbon. I suppose it has a sort of international feel to the room. I need to buy an exotic plant to go on the toilet to tie it together.

 

I’m not sure how I feel about my paintings hanging in the bathroom—I like seeing them, but there’s just something about it being a bathroom. I feel like this was a “just put something up” project because there had been no decorations at all in that bathroom or my kitchen.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is that I’m trying, and it’s fun. I can’t wait to buy a house in the next couple years to really be able to decorate.