Our Apartment!

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time, but it's taken us a while to get things unpacked and clean enough to actually take pictures.  Several people have asked about our apartment, so I thought I'd take pictures and do a digital tour of the place! 

After a ride in a tiny elevator up to the 5th floor, this is the view just walking in our front door.

Entry way and view down the hall

Immediately to the right  opens up into our living/dining room.  The first of three balconies is just outside the big door in the living room.

Living room, with a cameo by Michael

Dining room, with a cameo by Michael's breakfast

 

This apartment came fully furnished down to dishes in the cabinets.  There was tons of furniture here but since we brought all of our stuff, we had them remove most of it before we moved in.  We kept a few pieces though--the couch and chairs, the grandfather clock, and the cabinet in the back by the dining room table.  I love having some of that old furniture in there!

 

Another one of my favorite features of the apartment are the gorgeous marble floors.  The main part of the house is all marble.  The bedrooms and office have hard wood floors, and the kitchen and bathrooms are tiled.

 

Just across from the entry way is Robbie's office.  This is the one room that will probably never be clean, just because we end up putting all the stuff we don't know what to do with in there and shutting the door. That's totally find with me, because we can close the door and not have to see it!

 

Office

 



Just down the hall on the left is our kitchen. I really thought I pared down all my kitchen stuff when packing to come out here, but I still have way too much to store in this space. It's probably 1/3 of the size of my kitchen in California and I only have three drawers and three cabinets to store things in. We're getting used to it now, but for the first couple weeks after I got home from the grocery store I would stand in the kitchen with my bags thinking "okay... now where am I going to put all this?"  We go to the store several times a week mostly because there's nowhere for it to go!

Kitchen

We do have a dishwasher, which many of the houses we saw didn't have.  The sink only has one compartment and no garbage disposal.  Our refrigerator is much smaller (I think it's shorter than me), and the oven is a convection oven (with all the temperatures in degrees Celsius).  We don't have a microwave yet either, but we just got a little stand that would hold one so it's next on our list. The second balcony and the clothesline are outside that kitchen door.

The next room down the hall on the right is Michael's room.  We kept all his jellyfish decorations from the California house--they filled up that room much better!  His room is good sized, and is this clean for about two and a half minutes a day.

Next down the hall is the laundry and "my" bathroom.  We have two bathrooms and they're both pretty small, so we each took one to set our stuff up in.  The green bathroom is the smaller of the two and has the shower.  The orange bathroom has the tub and is just across the hall.

Next is our bedroom:

And finally, little Robbie's room/guest room with the third balcony.

I was so worried about the poor movers who had to move all of our stuff in.  Hardly any of it would have fit in the elevator and I thought they'd have to lug it all up five flights of stairs.  But I guess they are used to moving people into tall buildings with tiny elevators and tight staircases--they had a lift. There were two guys at the bottom who loaded the lift up with boxes, sent it up to little Robbie's balcony, and two more guys unwrapped and unloaded everything in the apartment.  It was much more efficient than carrying it all up the stairs for sure!

Although our apartment isn't the biggest place we saw, we don't have 15th century frescoes on the ceilings or Murano glass chandeliers like some of our friends, it's a good home for us. And we get to watch gorgeous sunsets off the balcony!