Sorry I’ve been MIA for a few days – my sleep schedule has gotten all out of whack and I’ve been distracted by just about anything even remotely shiny.

I’ve been looking around at our apartment lately and have been trying to come up with more ways to make it feel like home. In our old place, we got really lazy and only hung up a few things, didn’t really try to decorate beyond “yeah, that fits pretty well in that spot”, and just generally didn’t try too hard. Now that we’re in this new place – Ethan’s first home – I feel this pressure to make it homey. My mom has been really helpful with this…she came over and helped me (read: did it for me). She hung up almost all of our paintings, posters, and photos, helped me figure out a better way to arrange the furniture, and gave me a few more pictures for Mother’s Day.

Our place has a nice, open floor plan, which I love. It feels a lot more connected than our old apartment, with the added bonus of it not trying to kill us. There’s a slight “1950′s tract house” feel to the layout, which just makes me goofy-happy since some of our furniture is midcentury. The tricky thing about apartment living, though, is that you generally are not allowed to paint rentals. I think we technically could do some painting if we really wanted to, but we’d have to paint it back if we moved out. While we’re tentatively planning to be here for at least two or three years, if all goes according to plan, that still seems like a little more trouble than it’s worth. That’s my laziness speaking, I know, but I just don’t really see the point of taking the time, money, and energy required for painting a room if it can’t be a permanent thing.

So for those who are fellow renters or who are just more creative than I am (not hard to be these days – my brain is fried): any suggestions? How do you dress up the plain white walls and beige floors of your average apartment?