Home Decorating Flashback: My First Apartment, From 10 Years Ago

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Ever since I was little, I always enjoyed decorating. Rearranging my bedroom furniture was something I did regularly, and I would even cut out little rectangles to size for my bed, dresser, desk, etc, and play with different arrangements on graph paper.

I got even more excited when my parents let me update my decor. I had things like pink walls and Debbie Gibson posters, and a sunflower theme with ballet posters. When I was a young teen, my friends and I spent hours and hours at a sleep over, cutting out pictures of hot boys from magazines, and taping them up behind my door, in a floor to ceiling collage of teenage eye candy. Unfortunately, my dad made me take that experiment in decorating down shortly after it went up. :(

But, I've always loved putting my own stamp on the spaces I've lived in, and when I recently came across a box of photos from college that included pictures of my first apartment, I just new I had to share them!

This little home decorating flashback goes back to fall of 2001, after I'd just moved into my first apartment, my sophomore year in college. It was an ugly 2 bedroom, 1 bath place, and my roommate was just a friend, but who a year and a half later became my boyfriend, and is now my husband (so yes, we've lived together longer than we've actually been together!). The apartment was cheap and outdated, but we had 6 other friends living in the same building with us, and hey, we were out of the dorms, so it was a paradise! I spent the whole summer between my freshman year and sophomore year planning out how to decorate this place, since I'd never gotten to do a living room or kitchen before. My roommate/husband, well, he contributed the toaster. Everything else was all me, and my, uh, interesting style of decorating.

I'm going to show two copies of each photo, one as-is, and the second with my comments. And please excuse the wrinkles, yellow stains, and tears on the photos, I'm not sure what happened to the box these were hiding in!

The entrance:

Front hall:

The tiny kitchen:

Our blue and green living room (my hubs had made me promise that I wouldn't decorate in girly colors, so I definitely ran with the whole blue and green thing):

My lovely bedroom:

My (now) husband's room:

And the bathroom:

After reliving these photos with my husband, I turned to him and was like, "Ohmuhgod, now do you see why I've been insisting that we get all new furniture after we buy a house next year?!?!"

We've lived with so much junky furniture for way too long! And I'd say my decorating style is just a little bit more sophisticated these days. I'm still working with what we've got, but at least I'm not taping wrapping paper to the walls anymore! I do still dig blue and green though, just less intense shades of blue and green.

Do you have photos of your very first place? If you looked back at your decorating style and preferences, how much would they have changed over the last 10 years of your life?