Our Old Apartment | A Few Before and Afters

OK,  so… Christmas is just a short day away! Can you believe it? With one more sleep ’til Christmas Eve I find myself anxious but also wanting to make these moments last a bit longer. I love the preparations just as much, if not even more, than the actual thing because then I know there’s a another whole year before Christmas comes again. And I love Christmas! It’s when I am at my happiest, especially since we’ve made it a tradition that my mom comes to visit over the holidays! Everyone’s happy, well-fed and thankful… We’ve been very busy these last couple of weeks (but then, we’re always busy) but we’ve also managed to sneak in many quality moments together and apart. I took my mom to Home Depot on Saturday morning (my favorite place to shop in town. Honestly.  Lumber, windows, paints, primers, French doors, hardware – better than clothes, I tell you! 🙂 Thinking about topics to post about, I realized I never got around to showing you some pics of our previous apartment taken by my sweet friend Alexia Guuinic.

We lived there for about a year and did a bit of decorating along the way. I experimented with paint colors and my husband and I attempted an Ikea bookcase hack. I sew slip covers, not perfectly, but they did the trick to hide our ugly brown chairs 🙂 We moved out at the end of June when we purchased our house but I still have some images and before and after shots that I never got to showing on the blog and I figured if I don’t show them now, I never will 🙂 Here’s how the living room looked like the day we moved in.

And here’s how it looked like the week before our move…

We started with a blank canvas and painted every single room a different hue… the living room (the only one I have good “after” images) ended up being Farrow & Ball’s French Gray – the prettiest green-gray I’ve ever seen – and it worked in showcasing our “beige” furniture (a better sofa or new slips were not in the budget so we had to work with what we had). Besides a few existing pieces like our bed, dining table and chairs, we also made a few purchases along the way to complement and fill in the gaps in our furniture layout. Tables, chairs and a few 19th-century etchings (possibly my favorite purchase this past year, with the exception of our house, of course). For the bedroom, I attempted a wallpaper look by stenciling the walls with a large scale Jacobean vine pattern. It was a major flop, but I did learn a few things along the way… So although I cannot tell you how to do it right, I can tell you a few things that I did do that were wrong.

For example, if you’re planning to use a stencil – do not ever use a spray adhesive to fix the stencil to the wall, especially if you’re planning to reuse the stencil to create an all-over, wallpaper effect . The paint and the adhesive will mix and create buildup on your stencil and clog your pattern. I did that and the pattern got clogged and the application less and less visible (see how the flowers are clear to the left in the image above and get thiner and less detailed to the right?) Stenciling is hard work and although I loved my pattern from CuttingEdge stencils, I will think again before embarking on another stenciling project again 🙂 And that’s about all I wanted to show you from our last home before closing that chapter entirely!

Thanks for stopping by and reading! Wishing you all a very happy holiday season!! Merry Christmas!!