Kitchen overhaul Part 1

We moved into our current apartment about a year ago, but it still doesn't really feel like home to me and there are a lot of things I'm not satisfied with.

I've only lived here since July 2009 because I went to college elsewhere and only spent some of the weekends at our place. Once of the things that bug me is the fact that all of our walls are white. The previous tenant had painted the whole apartment black - even the ceilings! Our landlord put up wallpaper to cover it up before we moved in, but it was some cheap stuff in a greyish brown color that needed to be painted.


Here's an example of what our walls looked like when we moved in

The only thing that had been painted were the ceilings. But the painters had done an awful job at that as you can see in the pictures. So the first thing we had to do was paint all the walls in a 690 square feet apartment. Our apartment building is from 1910, so the ceilings are high, which made the task even more daunting. We bought quality paint and still had to paint the walls four times to cover the nasty wallpaper up.

I had originally planned to paint the rooms in different colors, but we were really annoyed with the whole thing and college was about to start, so we left them white. Now, one year later, there's still no change. I already collected some paint swatches, but before I can make any decision as to which colors work best, I'll have to convince my fiancé that painting is absolutely necessary...

However, I decided that we needed some new furniture for our kitchen. We're on a budget, so I looked for stuff on sale. We needed more storage in the kitchen, and then I found this beauty on sale at Ikea.



It's actually supposed to be a bookcase, but we're using it as a buffet. We were originally looking at this one this one and this one this one , but they are more expensive over here in Germany and we simply couldn't afford them. I like this one too, and now I'm thinking about painting it white to tie it in with the rest of our white kitchen.

We also bought a new kitchen table. Our old table was too big for our kitchen because it was located in the center of the room and I needed space to move around. Most of our friends don't live in this city anymore and we hardly ever entertain, so we decided we needed a smaller table.

Note: Please ignore my messy kitchen! We're in the process of overhauling several rooms right now and there's stuff everywhere. I tried to take the pictures without showing too much of the mess, but it simply wasn't possible...


This was our old rectangular table

As you can see, our old table wasn't huge, but we needed something even smaller. So this is the new one:



It's 30"x30" and this square shape works a lot better in our kitchen. And it's still big enough to fit 4 chairs! What I also love about it, is that it offers additional storage as it has 6 drawers. There are 4 small drawers on one side and 2 big ones on the other.



This is it for now, but I'll be back soon with part 2 of the overhaul!