Your Apartment’s Living Room: Creating a welcoming and cheerful space

It’s been a long, cold winter and you’ve been grateful many times for the coziness of your new apartment. Sipping a cup of steaming soup at the breakfast nook in your neat-as-a-pin kitchen; luxuriating in the hot shower that heats up your little bathroom nicely; snuggling under the covers in your dreamy bedroom – all these comforts have been yours in recent weeks.

You’ve been busy at work, and happy so far with your escape pad, so – admittedly – the living room has served all this time as little more than a passageway to the bedroom.

But then nature intervenes. Suddenly you look up one morning at blue sky through branches laden with delicate buds. The breeze is gentle as you slip out the door, and your walk to work is an adventure in newness. Spring has arrived!

The next morning, you wander out into the living room and, remembering that the view looks out on the building’s courtyard, you open the curtains for the first time since moving in two months ago. Sure enough, a profusion of color and light rewards you as the drapes part. You stand a moment, breathing it in.

When you turn back to the room, though, a less attractive sight presents itself.  Not that you’re impulsive or anything: you just know your mind. And your mind is telling you to take the day off and rectify this situation right now. Not even pausing for breakfast, you attack the piles of boxes, books, bags, and bobbles, sorting and organizing and finding everything a home.

When the space is clear of most of the little clutter, you take a deep breath and eye the furniture. There’s a sofa, armchair, hassock, and entertainment center.  You are careful to use leverage, more than muscles, as you maneuver the entertainment center against the far wall, angling it just right so it’s shaded from the window.

Fortunately, the couch is close to the opposite wall already, and you wedge it in easily. Now, where does the armchair go?

Hmmmm. You realize this first arrangement isn’t going to work. Your go-gettum attitude still intact, you make a beeline to the next-door-neighbor’s apartment, and beg some help. The cheerful young man (he’s a driver for UPS) is happy to oblige, and together you wrestle the entertainment center clear across the room to where the sofa had been. The sofa and armchair, then, are angled towards each other against the opposite wall, making the room seem almost circular.

Hey, this is going to work! You thank your helper (his name is George) profusely, and offer him a glass of tea. George is working on putting together a crib for their brand new baby, though, so he declines the refreshment.

On the way out the door, he spies a tube of removable wall decals, and asks what it is. You’re thrilled to tell him about the products, and show off your own applications in the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.

After George is gone, you collapse on the couch and survey your newly created domain. Most of your early-morning nonstop energy has fizzled, it seems. You wander over to your computer, and start putting together a list of friends to invite to your apartment-warming party.

But first, you go to the WallCandy® Arts site and order up a few goodies as a thank you to your helpful neighbor.  He’ll get a kick out of decorating the crib with them!

The bedroom and bathroom are arranged to your tastes now in your brand new apartment. Your mother commented favorably about the removable wall decalswhen she dropped by on Wednesday, and your best friend loves your new table lamp.

You’re a little bit shocked that you could go on for days like this, eating out and coming home to crash luxuriously in your cozy bedroom suite.

But this is getting out of hand. You’ve just got to stop wasting all that money in restaurants, and you’ve been hankering for some nice home cooked macaroni and cheese. It’s time to make the kitchen useable.

The next Saturday morning, boxes of books and stacks of pillows and bric-a-brac get shoved from the kitchen onto the living room floor. A thorough cleansing follows, taking much longer than you planned, of course, because your standards are significantly higher than the previous tenants’.  You scrub and swipe to your heart’s content and then sit in the breakfast nook with a tall glass of milk and a watercress sandwich (yes, you popped over to the farmer’s market earlier this morning) surveying your culinary domain.

Energized by lunch, you get to work lining the drawers and cabinets with vinyl stickers so they’ll be pretty and easy to clean. Then it’s a breeze unpacking the several crates of kitchen ware. There’s a nice deep drawer for pots and pans; and you love the look of your crockery behind the glass cabinet doors.

You pause for a minute and watch the afternoon sun spill over the breakfast nook table onto the kitchen floor, and then you look to the sink, which is against the opposite wall, with no light. Not happy with this feature, you finish unpacking, and make a grocery list while the problem simmers in the back of your mind.

The apartment’s front door is adjacent to the kitchen, and there’s a bit of wall space beside it where you apply a chalkboard sticker for quick notes to yourself. Can’t miss important reminders if they’re right beside the door when you go out!

Easy solutions to a small space

Your new apartment is still in a state of chaos, except for the charming perfection of the bedroom, which you got all arranged yesterday. Last night, you threaded through the boxes in the living room to find a bottle of juice in the fridge, and enjoyed the refreshing snack back in your room. Later, getting ready for bed, you were dismayed to realize you can’t find your toothbrush, buried as it is somewhere deep in the pile of totes in the kitchen.

So this morning, priorities are clear: time to get the bathroom in order. Again, it’s not a large space: in all honesty, it’s tiny, but that doesn’t worry you.

After applying a good scrub to everything in the space, you manage to locate theshower curtain you grabbed on sale at Target. Clipping it up to the curtain rod, you appreciate your excellent foresight in choosing a small-print pattern that helps to keep the space open. A loud, large print would have made the room seem smaller.

Fitting all your toiletries in the space has you stumped for a while. There’s very little in the way of horizontal surface for holding things. You fill the medicine cabinet, the windowsill, the top of the toilet seat. It’s starting to look pretty untidy.

You don’t want to go back to the superstore, but this is starting to look serious. You take a deep breath, and clear everything out of the bathroom and onto your bed.

Then you look at the little room again. You can see four screws on the wall next to the sink, painted over in the usual beige, which previous tenants must have used to hold up shelves. But you don’t happen to have shelves handy, and you only have til 2pm to get this done.

Since no bright ideas to solve the dilemma seem to be forthcoming, you wander into the living room and pick up your delivery from WallCandy® Arts. You ordered a set of removable and reusable wall stickers, Stripes, and you calm your puzzled mind by carefully putting them up on the bathroom walls. When you’re done, the line follows an artful slant, and once again, helps enlarge the space.

Your glance falls on the sink, and you wonder where you’ll stash your toothbrush, and all of a sudden – ah ha! You march to the kitchen and retrieve all the tote bags sitting in a large pile in the corner. Dumping them on the bedroom floor, you empty out four mesh bags, and hold your breath as you hang them on the pre-existing bathroom wall screws. As it happens, they’re suspended just below the stripes you have put up, and they work perfectly to hold (and hide!) all your bathroom necessities.

Oh, and what about your toothbrush? For some reason, this problem takes longer to solve. You don’t want to use a plastic cup from the kitchen, and you don’t want to waste your allotted holes in the wall on a hanging toothbrush holder.

It’s not until your birthday (the next day!), when your co-worker gives you a really beautiful and useless little candy dish, that the moment of truth arrives. Setting the gift carefully on the bathroom sink, with the tube of paste and brush easily resting atop, you’re once again in awe of the easy solutions that are there if you just look for them!

In the bedroom especially, make it uniquely yours

Ah the pleasures of apartment living. It’s such a luxury not to worry about mowing the lawn or fixing the plumbing.  Though compact, an apartment is convenient, close to all the work and social centers of your life. What’s more, an apartment presents a great opportunity for creative interior design.

For one thing, the space is probably small, so design choices need to work to make it feel a bit roomier.  Use light colors whenever possible; hang a small mirror on the wall; provide enough shelves and cabinets to keep clutter to a minimum.

Imagine a cozy little apartment you found just a few blocks from your job. It has lots of windows and a breakfast nook and a nice big closet in the bedroom.  The living room window looks out at a small courtyard. You couldn’t be more excited about getting all settled in.

How will you furnish and decorate your new home? Let’s look at each room, and dream up some ways to make it yours.

Let’s start with the bedroom, because once that space is comfortable, you can take your time with the rest. You bring with you the small four-poster you inherited from Aunt Sally. Modest as the size of this bed is, it takes up a lot of the bedroom’s floor space.

What to do? You were planning to include a chest of drawers as well as a small overstuffed chair, but the room won’t accommodate both without feeling crowded.  You eye the large bedroom closet, and inspiration begins to flow.

An hour later, you’re back from the discount megastore (WalMart) with a full set of inexpensive plastic drawers, which fit perfectly into the closet. You also picked up a shoe rack and a small set of stackable baskets. Your clothes all arrange themselves neatly within these cubbies, and stay discreetly behind the closet door. That bulky (and expensive) chest of drawers is no longer necessary.

You also just couldn’t resist a sublime little lamp you found at the store. It looks just right on the small side table next to the armchair that you bought several years ago because it called your name when you went into the furniture outlet.

Now you step back and survey. The bed’s near one wall, set out just far enough so it’s easy to make up in the morning. Your chair and lamp are on the other side of the window. Looks good. You turn around.  Uh-oh.

Bare beige wall.

See, one of the limitations in apartment living is that quite often, tenants aren’t allowed to paint or paper the walls. Usually, the building owners require sticking tobasic beige; often limits are placed as well on the number of nails allowed for picture hanging.

Not that you have anything against beige, but that stretch of wall at the foot of your bed just screams for something more exciting. Thank goodness you happened on the WallCandy® Arts website the other day, and you have another eureka moment.

DottiLicious! These whimsical bubbles will bring delight every time you look at them. And the best part is that you can make different arrangements of them whenever the muses so move.

Settling back in your good friend, the armchair, and surveying your new very personal space, you just couldn’t feel more at home. There are three other rooms yet to do, but they can wait til tomorrow. You’re confident that your creativity will serve you just as well after a good night’s sleep.

You’ve probably seen the larger-than-life wall stickers of football giants or other celebrities (military tanks, superheros, roaring lions – there’s a host of them) that you can buy to slap up on your TV room wall.  Grown-ups these days are rediscovering a primal pleasure that kids already know well.

For some reason, stickers hold endless fascination for just about anybody.  Kids, especially, are huge sticker fans.

And when they’re wall stickers, well, it’s the best of all.

A picture that just sticks wherever you put it is way cool in the first place.  And decorating the walls is a time-honored kids’ pastime, right?  How many of us were caught scribbling on those forbidden surfaces?  Having walls we can paint or decorate however we wish is one of the first great liberations when kids finally leave home.  That’s why college dorm rooms are, well, shall we say, very expressive.

As you know, WallCandy Arts has wall stickers that appeal to different ages as your child grows up.  From designs that delight infants to those beloved by toddlers to other, more mature designs for young children, these stickers are no muss, no fuss toys and companions that young people treasure.

Now here’s the really awesome part.

You might think that stickers don’t exercise a child’s imagination very much.  Seems there’s not much more to it than sticking them here, sticking them there.
You might think it’s all just for fun, but using wall stickers can actually be a way to encourage your child’s thinking processes.

Stickers for kids are almost like Lego’s or paper dolls, remember them?  They were beloved because you could use the various parts to make your own arrangement.  Any toy that allows us to use our own imagination and make our own creations quickly becomes a favorite.

Stickers for kids are like that.  You have a bunch of them, and you put them together in your own unique way.  And then you disassemble what you’ve made and go through the process again, just because.

WallCandyArts products are created to provide these developmental advantages.  Our designs are artfully simple, and they bring out the creative in you!  The wall stickers from WallCandyArts invite you to play with them, finding your own special expression, creating one-of-a-kind designs in your child’s room.  Here are some examples of wonderful decorating by families very much like yours.

But wait, there’s more!  Is your child starting school, or older?  WallCandyArtschalkboard stickers let your kids actually write on the wall!  There just isn’t much that’s cooler – or more conducive to your child’s analytical and imaginative growth – than that.

And parents, it’s all without making a mess.

Want to give your kid a clean, safe, and stimulating environment – one they can rearrange to their hearts’ content without causing you grief?  Wall stickers for kids are a great option!

Here’s a fantastic use of our Chalkboard.

Hours of fun for this little girl!

Preparing a room to welcome the newest member of your family is one of life’s more exciting and creative challenges. Options for nursery decor abound, and new parents can spend many hours (or days or weeks!) deciding on furniture and accessories that will provide comfort and joy for the baby. If it’s your first time around, the options can seem endless, and you’re probably very concerned with making the right choices.

A crib, a small bureau, a nice rocking chair, a changing table are all clearly necessary. While there’s no need to impress your baby with fancy, expensive furniture, you do want to purchase the highest quality you can affordfor two reasons: it must be completely, thoroughly, and absolutely baby-safe; and it will undergo a lot of wear and tear.

You must be able to darken the room completely, but you also want plenty of daylight for playtimes. So consideringwindow treatments is an important part of your decorating. Make them as flexible as possible. Situate the crib in a place where window light can be seen and enjoyed, but don’t put it next to a window. Babies can be extremely light-sensitive; and you certainly don’t need to expose them to any drafts.

After these basics of nursery décor are covered, perhaps the space still seems less-than-cozy. The colors you choose for furniture, walls, and rugs can help give the room harmony and a peaceful atmosphere. While pastels may be a traditional choice for anything baby-related, consider selecting a few bright colors as accents, which will become favorites as your child progresses towards toddler-hood.

This brings up a key issue for new parents: how to decorate so that the room grows along with its inhabitant, and adapts to changing preferences and needs. If nothing else, kids are always changing in leaps and bounds. Your significant investment in their nursery décor lasts a year or two, and then something new and different becomes necessary. Over only a few years, you’ll outgrow the crib and changing table; you’ll realize the drapes are way too ‘baby-ish;’ you’ll want to provide more appropriately stimulating surroundings for your child.

Enter WallCandyArts, of course. If you’re a good artist, you can paint murals on the nursery walls, or if you really love torturous work, you can put up wallpaper. For all the rest of us, WallCandyArts provides a way for the ‘theme,’ the ambiance, the overall feeling of the nursery to keep pace with your young one’s growth. From bubbles and butterflies for the new baby to writeable chalk boards, cars, trees and much more,WallCandyArts decals make it easy to redecorate.

Take comfort, dear new parents. This kind of changing and adapting and choice making is what parenting is all about. WallCandyArts is pleased to help you not only get used to the constant transitions, but also come to relish them!