One thing that may not be apparent from the photos is that my bathroom (the master bathroom; Robert is using the somewhat smaller guest bathroom across the hall) is big. The small blue rug that I used to have in my bathroom in Snow City? Way too small. I gave that one to Robert (and really it's kind of small for his bathroom too, but not as ridiculously so) and put the matching full sized blue area rug (what? 5' x 7' maybe?) that used to be in the living room in Snow City in my bathroom and it fit perfectly, while leaving enough space next to the bathtub for a normal wash-every-week cloth bath mat. So no cold feet for me.
Here's my storage area next to the door. (There is storage under the sink but not enough and I get light-headed from bending down to get things from low places. I saved that space for cleaning supplies, etc.) In Snow City, our bathroom had a built-in closet with shelving in this position, but at our new place, we needed to supply our own storage. We first thought of buying a white wooden storage closet with doors and shelves inside that we found at Lowe's, but it looked like a bitch to put together and it was too big to fit in Robert's car. Then I remembered how in Austin I used to have a metal shelving rack in the bathroom (which we still have, serving as a pantry area in our last several apartments). So I found the grey, red, and cream colored bins in several sizes at Lowe's and we bought them along with this rack that Robert put together quite easily. But I still needed a couple more big bins, and I was disappointed not to have any blue bins to match my rug. A little exploration on Amazon revealed these delightful animal ones from 3Sprouts and my heart went pitter-pat. (The designs looked sorta familiar and then I saw that this company also made the big-ass raccoon storage bin that Robert and I bought for his mom.)
Here you can see the bath area and a corner of the rug. In Snow City, both bathrooms had glass doors, so I was like, Aw, man, I'm going to have to buy a shower curtain! (For the first two days in our new place, we were screwed--on day 1, I took a shower at our old apartment while we were there to pick up the last of our things and on day 2, I took a shallow bath in the new tub.) But Robert was convinced that my old shower curtain was packed away somewhere...and he was right. We even had the rings to attach it. I bought a plastic liner at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and it was good to go. Robert didn't have a shower curtain for his bath, but picked out a handsome navy one in a waffle fabric that doesn't need rings (it has built-in rings that split to go around the shower rod) and has a built-in liner that can be detached and washed--pretty fancy.
I had a nice metal over-the-shower-door hanging rack for all my bottles, but of course that doesn't work with a shower curtain. But at Target I found a simple 3 level metal rack that fits on the (very generous) corner of the tub and that seems to be working well.
It has double sinks, but I've closed up the plug on the left one (so I do not drop any jewelry down it when I lean over to put on an earring or whatever) and am only using the right one. I've filled the drawers down the center of the vanity with the same stuff I had in the same drawers in my Snow City apartment (I had packed away those drawers by putting everything together into different plastic grocery bags, which made it easy to take things out and refill the drawers again).
I didn't photograph this, but to the right of the sink is the toilet. I have the same metal rack over it that I've had in my last few apartments to hold Kleenex, a clear plastic bin of washcloths, etc.
The only thing missing at this point is that I have bare walls that I need to cover up with interesting things in frames. We haven't even opened our art boxes yet. I expect that will happen near the end of this process, once we see how much wall space we have. My strong expectation is that we have more wall space than at our old apartment, so I'll be picking out some new stuff to supplement what we already have. To me, it makes sense to see what the wall space in the whole apartment looks like, allocate art to those spaces, and then decide what to get to fill in the blanks...and to do this all at once, not piecemeal. I'm already missing my Big Wall o' Rabbits in my office, so maybe the desire to get something up to cover these boring white/cream textured walls will be the kick in the pants I need to spend the time getting our place into shape.
I didn't do much today because it took me a long time to get my clothes for the week sorted (more on this later) and I was feeling sick. Robert was at it, though, building bookcases, getting air filters changed out and running...I mean, the man has even filled one entire bookcase in his mini-office in the dining room, including putting out his collection of little animal sculptures along the top! This being said, the dining room table is now an official disaster zone with stuff he's taken out of boxes but doesn't have a place to put yet.
Tomorrow is another (for me, hopefully more productive) day.
