A few months ago, Joanna wrote an excellent post on the “Philosophy Behind Decor”. She talked about being very intentional about the placement of the furniture in your home.

Now that the Christmas stuff has been put away, I have been looking around our apartment and trying to decide where I want the furniture to be long-term so I can hang up pictures on the walls. My desire is to have the decor functional yet beautiful and relaxing. Visual appeal is very important to me, and my challenge is to do this while remaining under budget. (By the way, now I am inserting a plug for a great blog I’ve recently started reading – Like Merchant Ships. The things she finds and decorates her home with are beautiful, and she is able to achieve the look mostly through garage sales and thrift stores!)

I’ve decided that the key to having a visually pleasant home is to reduce the clutter, and that’s one of my goals as I head into this new year. As I have been busy cleaning, unpacking (yes! still!), and decluttering, I have been trying to sell or give away whatever I honestly don’t need anymore. I have sold a bunch of stuff on Craigslist, and was less successful on Ebay. Part of my problem is most of the stuff I have is small low-value knicknacks that just aren’t worth my time to sell.

I posted pictures of our new apartment almost two months ago. Paul and I spent a lot of time measuring all the walls (which do not meet at a 90 degree angle, we found out… Sometimes parallel walls were an inch or two different). I used a free online program called Jordan Furniture’s Room Planner to decide the best method to rearrange everything. It’s pretty nice; similar to what I’ve used in the past (which is no longer available). I tried a lot of different room planners and liked this one the best.

We also decided to paint our dining room green. I LOVE to paint the walls (I get it from my mom), and having all-white walls all over the apartment depresses me. I picked a darker green for the bottom half, and a lighter green for the top half, leaving the chair rail and the window frames white. I really, really like the result! Here is a picture of our dining room (click to make bigger):

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I don’t have a good picture of the living room, but here is what I have:

Some of the stuff I need to put on walls still. For example, in the dining room you can see a black bookcase with my wooden tea cup rack on it. I also have a whole pile of posters and framed pictures. It would be good to get that off the floor of our bedroom!! I also have two towel racks to hang in our bathroom – I am really bad about hanging towel racks. A third thing on the “to do” list is to get a smaller coffee table. The current one has three glass panels, and my darling cat decided we only needed two glass panels. So, since the table is a little big for the space anyways, we decided to keep our eyes open for a smaller, black one.

We do have a goal: some friends are coming to stay with us in February, and I’d love to get everything done before then. At the very least, we need to tackle the guest room, which is currently more of a “junk room”. So a lot of sorting and organizing in the next few weeks! It will be good to get everything done and settled; I still feel like I just moved in!