Wall shelves

Just put up some cute Ikea wall shelves today on my "feature wall" (Ikea, go figure!) Was kind of sad to make holes on my beautifully new painted stripes but it turned out great!

I will also post a picture after I figure out what to put up on them...I got some ideas in mind!

Patio idea

The next thing on my list is to tackle my patio. I didn't think a little studio apartment would require so much work!!

I have some really cool ideas for my patio, stick around to see the before and after pics! It's a really long and narrow patio but it's got some potential!

Here's a picture I found on Pinterest as inspiration, love this idea and my patio is the same width...

Build a table with left over countertop

So I only need about 12 inch wide of a countertop and I'm thinking of building a cool table for my patio with the remainder material. Ill definitely blog about it and tmake pictures of the progress!

I think that'll be such a cool idea, especially if I decide to get the butcher block countertop! 😍😍

What to do with an extra mirror?

I had a nice IKEA mirror laying around that I couldn't figure out where I wanted to put, and my black coffee table that I wanted to get rid of... so I thought I would try putting my mirror on my coffee table to give it a cool effect and look like I have more space (which is what you have to keep trying to do in a studio apartment!) It definitely changed the whole look, which is what I was going for.

So if you have some mirrors kicking around, don't toss them because you could always put them to some cool use!

LED tv stand gives cool vibe..

I was going through my closet organizing and found nice IKEA LED lights I had no use for anymore. I thought it would be cool to put it in my Ikea bookshelf that I used as a tv stand to give off a cool ambient lighting effect when I sat in my room in the dark.

I went to home depot and bought a pack of little velcro attachments and used them so I could easily remove the lights whenever I wanted without ruining them or my bookshelf. Super easy and it turned  out really fun. Made the room really relaxing.

Make a room feel more spacious and inviting

After staring at my plain light grey wall in my little "shoebox" apartment, I thought what could make a room appear wider without spending tons of money on huge mirrors every where. Then I thought stripes! Horizontal stripes always make things looks and feel wider. What better way than to use the dark grey paint that I have been using to accent the rest of my apartment and kitchen with to make a cool feature wall!

Thankfully my boyfriend has every single tool you can possibly ask for, so when I randomly asked him if he had a laser that levels and gives you perfectly straight lines... of course he said yes.

So we measured out the height of the wall which worked out to be around 91 inches.
Then take 91 and divide that by 7 (because that's how many stripes I wanted).
So that means each stripe will be 13 inches.
So I used a ladder and placed the laser on each step with the help of stacking lots of books and DVDs to measure up to each 13 inch mark I had placed on my wall with Frog tape.
Make sure you already have your base color painted on the whole wall first (if that wasn't obvious already!)
Then I used the laser beam and used the Frog tape to make straight lines across the wall to make the 7 stripes, now the important thing is to make sure you are putting the tape along the base color and not on the side you are painting the stripes on (if that makes sense).

Now after I placed two coats, I gave the paint about 40 ish minutes to dry to peal off the tape (away from the paint) gently. I did not want to wait until the paint was fully dry to avoid ripping and pealing off my beautiful new stripes! And voila! I got crisp, beautiful dark grey stripes on my wall. It made me love the room so much, I honestly could not stop staring at it for hours. It made the room feel so cozy and inviting and I just love sitting in this room. It made it feel bigger and more spacious.

Hope you guys love it as much as I do!!

Before...

After!!

Bathroom upgrading

The bathroom needed some MAJOR upgrading. The colors were just so bland and boring. I painted the ceiling and walls light grey and decided to make the vanity table side wall "pop" by adding some cool wall paper design. It turned out awesome and really brought out the bathroom. I upgraded the faucet, wow does changing a fixture really make a huge difference. The beautiful chrome faucet was found by accident while shopping with my mother at Costco, and the price was just as awesome too..$99! Talk about sticking to my budget without compromising style and design. I will eventually change the bathroom lighting and mirror but all in good timing..hey, I still gotta pay my bills! :P

S

Before

After

Coffee "bar" nook

After browsing Pinterest for some more inspiration, I found a cool idea for some space I had in my kitchen area. Why not have a cute little coffee bar? I had an IKEA malm vanity table kicking around that was just taking up space in my main living area so I decided to move it to my kitchen and throw some extra textiles I had that was causing clutter in other areas.

It definitely made the kitchen area seem more cozy and more of a modern feel to it! Let me know what you guys think :)

As usual, my before and (kind of) after pics!

Before...

Almost after...lol

kitchen progress!

So after about 4 months of moving in and paying bills and living expenses... I finally was able to buy my new kitchen cabinets at IKEA (not to mention, the sizes I needed were IMPOSSIBLE to find!).

Super excited I finally have my new beautiful white cabinets, now I can finally rip out the rest of the ugly wood ones and start to see some hope! It was definitely hard walking through the kitchen every day and seeing that horrid site so you can imagine my excitement! After removing the old cabinets and ugly old appliances, there are always lovely surprises to find behind the walls (which I would rather not say!). There were lots of big holes in the wall that we covered with spray foam to fill the larger holes and then mesh and dry wall putty to fill in the rest. We used at least 2 coats after sanding. Then I decided to use my left over dark grey paint that I used on all my doors (which I will also blog about) in my kitchen to make the white cabinets pop. I was really happy with the results, but still not done painting but you get the jist!

After looking around for under cabinet lighting, I realized how expensive all of them were and I didn't want any wires or cords to show so after some smart shopping I found some cool simple and modern puck lights from IKEA that were a really good price and battery operated to add a nice touch to my kitchen.

Here a few pictures to show the transformation progress. Still so much more to do...finish painting, put custom wine rack along the side of the microwave range and add back splash but it's getting there!! :)

Before...

The kitchen...urgh

So, let's not even talk about the kitchen. First off, the pictures make the before picture of the kitchen look way better than it actually did up close in person! The old sticky wood cupboards, yucky off white/yellow walls (which I think the previous owners were smokers in here and it is more like a smokers yellow paint color, yuck!) It just overall had the worst vibe ever. It totally depressed me walking through here every day and kind of made me regret buying this place! But at the end of the day, I bought it and the work must get done somehow!

I didn't waste any time ripping the kitchen apart, I think I lasted 20 minutes after walking in to it after getting my keys! So like I mentioned in my previous post, single person, everything is expensive, doing it all myself, blah blah blah...so everything I had planned to do for renos was on an EXTREME budget!!! 

My game plan was to completely upgrade the one side of my kitchen (the side with the sink), by buying Giani granite paint and Giani cabinet paint..it was well worth it and saved me A LOT of money in the end which was super important. The other side with the fridge and stove was going to be completely new everything so that's where I needed to keep my budget. After the first week of being moved in, I managed to finish painting the cupboards from ugly brown wood, to beautiful white. My boyfriend helped me drill holes in the cupboards to screw in the modern handles onto them ...and WOW, what a difference already! 

The following week I tried out the Giani granite paint and after spending hours painting the granite design on my counter top, I realized I liked it better when I had just used the black base paint that came in the kit..yup, you guessed it. I painted over all my hard work with the base paint then used the sealer to give me a gloss black finish. Then after hours and hours of looking online and at home depot multiple times for the perfect back splash, I finally saw the one I had envisioned in my mind at Lowes. Phiew, now that I got that out of the way ,now here's the fun part. Cutting small pieces of glass tile (Dave did this part of course), and placing them one by one took a lot of patience and meticulous work. Also grouting for my first time ever was not as much fun as I had anticipated! But overall, it turned out great! For the final touch, I found a beautiful modern chrome faucet while at Lowes that was really well priced and voila!

Here are the before and ALMOST not so after pic of the one side of my kitchen....

Get the keys to my FIRST place!!

Needless to say, I did not get much sleep the night before getting my keys to my place! Being a first time home owner has come with a lot of different feelings and nerves...I feel excitement, nervous, freedom, scared...and did I mention scared?! But this is definitely going to be a fun experience!


I never thought that I would be buying an apartment, but moving to BC as a single person kind of limits your options because everything is so bloody expensive around here! Not to mention, buying a studio apartment! This building is from the 70's, so you can imagine how much TLC it needs. I will be posting and blogging on my reno and design progress as I go, and I can't wait to hear all your feedback!

I will also be posting lots of DIYs that I will be doing with the help of my lovely boyfriend (thank god for him!!) Please feel free to ask me any questions and to comment, I would love to know what you guys think!