Apartment updates

After reaching a fairly comfortable living point, I stalled on getting my apartment together. I think I just got over it, moving is rough. After all the packing, loading, cleaning, unloading, unpacking, organizing and re-organizing, it gets to be a little much. One of the things I've been putting off is putting up the blackout curtains, but only because I actually have to trim them and hem them (using the cheat method of hemming tape).

Living in Montague spoiled me on how dark my room would get at night- completely dark really. And I totally understand that living in the city means lights on all the time, but I apparently live on the Vegas strip because my apartment complex is so incredibly illuminated that it is daylight 24 hours a day. The pictures hardly do it justice being as the exposure time on my camera adjusts itself to the light, but all of these pictures were taken without a flash.

This is my apartment complex as seen during the day.

This is my apartment complex at night.

Every single one of those lights stays on all night until the sun is well past coming up in the sky. There are some obvious benefits to this. If someone is sneaking around my window...well ok, forget it, no one can sneak around in that sort of spot light.

Some of you might say, that's how it is living in the city. No, this is how it is living in the city:

By the way, that daylight glow coming from the left of the photo is from my complex. The remainder is the street is significantly darker.

My front door...and my windows. Just your average horizontal window blinds on those babies.

Looking from my front door out into the courtyard. You could get a tan down there. 

So obviously it would benefit me to get my blackout curtains up. I made a bit of improvements to the kitchen, being as storage and room are hard to find around here. 

 I got the bars, hooks and pots from Ikea. Hanging these above the stove freed up space in the drawer for spices and space in the cabinet for small appliances.

You don't get to see all of the living room because I've still got some clutter around there that I'm pretending to be dealing with, but here's some storage solutions I've implemented for the larger things.

My bikes hang vertically from the ceiling next to the futon in the living room. I live right next to the San Andreas fault line by the way. This should be fun. I wanted to hang them both the same way but I was having some issues with the tires blocking the light switch for the kitchen. I knew if I did that it would drive me absolutely nuts, so I went with just hanging them how they sat best. Road bike in front, mountain bike behind.

And yes, that is my swim gear sitting on the futon. Because I swim now. I'm back.

My surfboard hangs on the other wall in the living room, above the furnace I may never use. It's the middle of January and I have not turned on my heat once in the two weeks I have lived here. The small box under my jacket is actually currently being used as a door stop, because the real door stop lacks the 2 additional inches I would need to keep the door from hitting my surfboard. Gotta have my priorities straight.

Here's my bedroom. Still a work in progress but it's coming along.

Not a whole lot has changed in the bathroom since I posted pics of it except that I got an over-the-toilet shelving thing for help with storage. I would show you a pic of that but currently there are wetsuits, swimsuits, towels and surf booties strewn all over the place in there. 

I've put some pictures up but I'm still working on that as well. It's been on my to-list for over a week. I finally just threw out my to-do list. It kept growing instead of shrinking. I'm over it.