Studio Apartment Decorating!

I've been working on improving my apartment. First, I made a DIY glass bubble light fixture. Then I reupholstered my chairs. Slowly, slowly, I have taken on other projects. Over the weekend, I rearranged my furniture to create separate kitchen and living rooms. I found an ingenious way to hang a book shelf from an exposed beam, and I covered my couch/guest bed with a really cute furry white throw in order to make it look more like a couch and less like a bed.

I did some research on studio apartment arrangement, and I learned two very important tenets: Don't push all the furniture to the edges of the room, and it's best to mount as many objects on the walls and ceiling as possible. I knew that I wanted to mount book shelves on the back wall of my apartment, but there was no way to mount them on crumbly plaster walls. The best option was to hang the shelf from the exposed beam that runs atop that wall. I bought a couple sturdy C-clamps from the local hardware store and a couple metal carabiners. I attached the C-clamps to the metal beam, and connected the shelf to the C-clamps with the carabiners. It is totally sturdy; can easily hold the weight of heavy books; and is easily removable - no drywall holes to fill.

Moving my furniture was more of a leap of faith. It was totally counterintuitive to place my couch in the middle of the room, but it actually makes the room look larger. I had a corner credenza in my "kitchen," which I moved to the far corner of the "living room" in order to make room for a seriously awesome shelving unit that I dumpstered (I'm saving this for Wednesday's post). My initial plan was to divide the kitchen from the living room with the credenza itself, but it proved to be too large. I actually could barely walk in the door without walking into it. I'm a creative thinker, so decided to go for it and place the couch right in the middle of the room. It worked! Suddenly the living room looks like a living room, and the kitchen looks like a kitchen, and there is still plenty of open floor space.

I'm not too into luxury products, but every time I sit on the furry white throw that I spent a whopping $40 on at my local home products superstore, I feel happy. I guess it was worth the expenditure. I needed a throw that would make the daybed look a lot more like a couch than a bed, and it seems to do the trick. It's a girly touch in a very plain apartment, which is also nice. I don't have much time to sit on the couch, but last night I really enjoyed sitting on my new fuzzy throw reading a book. Maybe a more accessible couch will encourage me to sit still a little more often.

Posted by: Chaya Goodman