Saturday, April 3, 2010

Finished Apartment #2

I am a landlady; on days like today when I get to show off a beautiful FINISHED apartment, it can be fun. My family lives on 1.5 floors of our three storey house, and then there's a little apartment on the rest of the second floor and a big apartment on the whole third floor. We recently finished renovating and renting Apartment #2.

We put in a kitchen, totally brand new.



A glimpse of the cool ceiling fan (we have one, too, in our living room).



All the ceilings are 11 feet tall: airy and gracious in the rooms, but forbidding in the hallway. My husband cleverly hung three paper lanterns to bring the ceiling down to cozy.





All the bathrooms have this black and white tile that we think dates to 1930 when the house was divided into three apartments.




We try to make the apartment one that we wouldn't mind living in - it also attracts the kinds of tenants we want. To that end, we painted the living room grey and the hallway a slightly darker shade of grey.

I did almost all the painting - during naptime and after the children were in bed. I had to paint the fieldstone fireplace surround because a former tenant had painted it with a terrible lack of skill or permission. But I was surprised how nice it looked with its new lights, black mantel and newly laid granite hearth.



And, hallelujah, our new tenant moved in yesterday.

4 comments:

Beth said...

It looks fabulous. Y'all have great taste! Excellent work. We (well HE) totally overhauled the kitchen/dining room of our first little house back in Alabama. Oh, it was lovely when finished...then we moved away 3 months later, rather unexpectedly! It was hard to say goodbye to all that hard work, but the Lord used it in the end to sell the house before we could even put in on the market!

Glad you got tenants already.

Margo said...

Beth, you touched on something I find hard about being landlords: doing all that work and then not getting to really LIVE in it and appreciate it. Glad yours paid off for you, though.

beth said...

It looks great! What a lot of work though...between naps and after bedtime??

Margo said...

beth, yes, a TON of work. But I'm focusing on the end result!