Hall - before

Right then. When I said warts and all I really meant it. I may have tidied up one or two little things but as you will see from the photos that appear this week one or two things is by no means enough to make any difference. But if I waited for a day when I could stage everything nicely, I would be waiting a very, very long time. Besides, maybe these photos will at least encourage some people to think that their place isn't so bad after all. As usual, they're not great photos but just enough to give you an idea of the space.

Note about my apartment
My place is 58 square metres big, which google tells me is nearly 625 square feet. This is really plenty of room for one person but it's not laid out very well which leads to quite a lot of dead space in some rooms. As always in a modestly sized place, there are lots of attempts to fit stuff in anywhere I can.

Hall

This is the view from the kitchen door, which is opposite the front door of my apartment (coats hang there). The shelves aren't the same black as the other two pieces, they're a very dark brown. But close enough to black that it's not really obvious. The pile of boxes in front of them is just waiting to be moved down to the cellar. The stuff I've decluttered recently is also there waiting to be moved out next Saturday. Shoe-horn and clothes brush are just hanging on nails beside the door and my cycling helmet is hanging on a hook on the side of the shelves. 

And here's the view from the other end, i.e. from the sitting room door. The bag hanging on the handle of the drawers contains vaccum-pack bags, which I got to pack some spare bedding and stuff into. That's a work in progress, so they just hang there waiting for now. The small mirror hanging on the wall is fairly new so the mirror hanging on the door of the cupboard will move somewhere else. The duster tends to move around to wherever I've been using it and get hung on a convenient doorknob. Oh, and the tea-bags are some I bought in Ireland in September to send to a friend. Procrastinators of the world unite!

And just for fun and kind of because I think it'd be fun to have a record of the things I hang on the walls, here's a close-up.

Print of a Dürer hare (moving in present from a friend - years ago when we were did our semester abroad in Germany I got a present of an address book with this on it. That was stolen years later and she was thrilled to find the same address book for me years later and then when I moved in here she couldn't resist getting me this picture). Cheapie black-framed mirror. Derek Beggs calendar.

And on the other side there's a small cork noticeboard. A poster of The Circle of Life - White Cloud and a small picture I bought as a teenager which says "The greatest kindness we can offer each other is the truth". I still hold to that sentiment although I'm not as fond of the style of picture now as I was then. Oh, and there's also a tester patch of creamy coloured paint which I did recently, just to make me feel like I'm doing something.

So that's that. The main thing to do here is move the stuff that's just sitting waiting to be moved but hopefully over the next while that stuff will leave every week and be replaced by more stuff waiting to leave. Paint over that horrible orange colour. Move the pictures and things around a bit - at the moment they are mostly just hanging on nails that the previous tenant had put in. And the mirrored doors that you can see at the end of the hall in one of the photos above hide two big cupboards which also need a serious clearing out and tidying up.