This post – pictures of our apartment here in Pittsburgh – has been forever in the making, it seems. Finally I’m posting the photos, now weeks after I took them, and only a couple months before we move away! I’m mostly doing this so that we will always have photos of what our first place looked like. This is where we will have spent the majority of our first year of marriage, so I don’t want to forget it!
Welcome to little apartment in Moon Township, PA! We’re on the ground level, so no walking up or down stairs to get there – so wonderful. Enter our living room…
We painted the walls this yellow color. In some of the photos it looks true to life (a peachy undertone), but in others it looks super bright and harsh…I promise you it’s not! This is the only room we painted because we have to paint it back when we move out.
Here’s the front door on the opposite wall:
I love this little white chair we got from Ikea!
Our place is filled with gifts and handmade things from family & friends, which I love. My sister Ellie made this shape of North Carolina (with a heart in Raleigh, where we met!) to remind us of our homestate all year long 🙂
Jon’s aunt made this for us – three heart-shaped maps of Raleigh, where we met, Charlotte, where we got married, and Pittsburgh, where we live now! We have to figure out what to do with it so it still applies even after we move back to Raleigh because I don’t want to put it away!
My aunt gave us this awesome Pittsburgh painting that she found at the Southern Christmas show. It’s extra special because the artist painted our names and the year we got married into the picture! It was hard to get photos of it without huge reflections in the glass, but I tried:
Below is the portion that contains my name, our last name, and “2012.” Can you find them?? My name is really hard to see…it’s in the bushes!
Do you see “Jon” below??
I love our huge window in the den, which is the sliding door to the balcony…the sky actually looks kind-of blue in this picture! Up until December we had lots of pretty blue skies, but since ever since then the majority of the time it’s been grey 😦 It’s a pretty view when it snows, though, and we get to see some gorgeous sunsets over the mountains in the distance.
Now to the other side of the front door…
My mom painted this plate with our last name on it and gave it to us when we got engaged! She also made the cute tray behind the column…as you can see in the photo above, it’s normally covered up with papers, haha. It’s a great place to put our incoming/outgoing mail.
Love this print from Emily Ley that says “I will hold myself to a standard of GRACE not perfection” – a necessary reminder for my perfectionism 🙂
This cabinet below is what we’ve been making do with in lieu of a pantry since we don’t have one here. We found it on Craigslist for less than it was at Ikea, and it was only a year old. I painted the backing a coral-ish color. Pretty things on the top shelves and all our food stored on the three shelves below!
Love the salad-serving spoon & fork my friend Olivia got me in Siena, Italy!
I’m keeping this adorable “Just Married” dishtowel, a wedding present from Anthropologie, out for as long as possible! When are we not “just married” anymore??
This is my little organization corner in the kitchen…a wipe-off calendar board (and you can see it was February when I took the pictures! or febrero – I like to write the months in Spanish), a “what to eat” notepad, where I keep track of what we’re having for dinner each day, and a “things to do around the house” notepad, where I write those things I really need to get done or might otherwise forget about, along with a shopping list at the bottom!
This half-wall in the kitchen allows a nice view outside (or of the TV) while cooking/washing dishes. Look, Carolina is playing basketball on TV and Jon is watching it!
Now down the hallway off the living room…
Jon’s sister gave us the framed prints of each of our alma mater’s next to our diplomas:
This apartment doesn’t have a whole lot of storage, so after we moved in and put all the big things away, I was left with a bunch of small things and important papers and no place to put them. We thought we would have room for a desk in our guest bedroom, but it was too cramped with Jon’s huge desk from college, so we got rid of the desk and didn’t have anywhere to keep office supplies or file papers. We had this built-in countertop below, though, and a big blank wall above it, so we decided to install these shelves:
I bought baskets and some magazine file boxes for our financial and insurance paperwork. The colorful alphabet divider you can see is one of many labeled with other important paper categories, like taxes, paperwork for each of our jobs, lease information, utilities, etc.
At the end of the hallway is our bedroom…
My huge armoire from Pottery Barn (a gift from Jon’s parents) is by far my favorite piece of furniture so far!
Ha, there’s me! I also love the mahogany wood of Jon’s dresser, which matches our bedside tables (also a gift from Jon’s parents from PB!)
A little hallway with our closests on either side leads to our bathroom…
Back-to-back with our bedroom and bathroom is our guest bed and bath. Here’s our little guest bedroom below…if you knew me in college, this looks very similar to my room at the Glendie! Same comforter, pillows, chair, curtains…I moved all the girly stuff to this room since I couldn’t have it in my own bedroom anymore, haha.
This is the dresser from my room at my parents’ house…I bought and painted it myself in high school and couldn’t let go of it!
I had so many wedding mementos I didn’t want to just store away right after the wedding, plus this great basket I bought to display the ceremony programs at our wedding. So I decided to put it all together to make a wedding montage for the year! Jon calls it our wedding shrine, haha.
The end! 🙂