Our Apartment--with Furniture!

Aaron at the dining room table/our
 desk before we hung pictures.

Where I write.  Quite comfy.

As of Thursday, we have a furnished apartment!  As of Friday, we even have a bed and kitchen table!  It took three trips to Ikea and one delivery truck, but it's finally all here.  (The third trip was for the kitchen table top and the bed slats which were sold out when we purchased things for delivery.  Have we told you this already?  I'm feeling repetitive.)  This means that I can sit on our loveseat with my feet up on the coffee table (how couth of me) while writing the blog entries!

Our little terrasse and a
glimpse of the laundry.

Now, if we've had furniture since Thursday, why are you only seeing it now?  Well, we'd been doing laundry, and we had lines of laundry EVERYwhere--one outside, one outside coming in, one from the kitchen window to the bathroom doorknob, and two in the bedroom!  That made it difficult to move around, much less take representative pictures of our living space.  So here you are, finally, with pictures of an apartment furnished by Ikea and some things we bought from Heidi, who was a lecturer here last year.  Todd is letting us use the television set for the year, and we turned it on last night to see what there is to watch--lots of French shows, plus Friends and Cougar Town.  The French must like Courteney Cox.

Starring the dining table in
its secondary role: desk.

We've decided to leave decorative items to a minimum because we'd rather get meaningful souvenirs during our travels around Europe than get shoddy attempts at objects conforming to our tastes from Ikea.  We brought maps and have put them on the walls to aid us in travel-planning and to provide some decoration.  We are planning on hanging maps of places we visit while we're here in the bedroom.  Besides that, we have some pictures from home, wedding pictures, a Beloit College calendar, and a towel representing Pennsylvania (part of our wedding gift from my cousin Adam and his wife Christine). The throws on the couch are also from home and can double as scarves for me.

Where breakfast and lunch happen.  

Where deliciousness happens.

When we first moved in, we thought we wouldn't need curtains because French apartments all seem to come with shutters (generally resembling the sort that stores pull down after hours in malls).  They keep the light out quite efficiently at night, and they provide good insulation.  They do not, however, provide a middle ground; they're either all the way shut or all the way open (well, I suppose they can be halfway up, but there's not much point to that).  After a few days of making eye contact with neighbors every time they walked to their cars, we decided we should add some light filtration.  We ended up getting just one pair of curtains from Ikea to cover five windows!  Thank goodness for iron-on hemming for cut-to-length curtains.  Now we just have to get to that ironing...

The bedroom, obviously.  Where the
 day ends, so where this entry ends.

Stay tuned for our next entry on making Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies abroad and perchance a rant about why I don't know enough html code to be able to lay out a blog entry with pictures in an aesthetically pleasing way.