Today I stopped by the local Trader Joe’s to pick up some dinner and fresh flowers. I immediately was drawn to the pink daisies. Adding flowers to a room is an easy and cheap way to brighten things up. Especially in a used wine bottle or a stemless wine glass (both things I already had in my kitchen.)

Mike’s cousin was generous enough to give us a few things for our new place. Two of which are these beautiful chairs.

Bertoia diamond chairs. They are most likely knock offs, but I have no way of knowing their authenticity. They are also in rough shape. There is a lot of rusting.

But with a little bit of elbow grease I intend to fix these up. Stay tuned to see how they turn out! And for those interested I’ve slipped in some photos of our balcony with it’s view.  Downtown Los Angeles would be visible but it appears to be especially smoggy today.

I took this weekend as an opportunity to finish off painting the kitchen cabinets and drawers as well as adding the new hardware. I’m so happy with the results! A much cleaner brighter look.

Scroll down for more photos of the process.

This rug is on sale at Urban Outfitters… me thinks it should look nice in either my living room or my bedroom.  $50… that’s about as cheap as a chic rug gets!

Possibly the ugliest part of the entire apartment was the kitchen cabinets. The rental standard veneer white with wood trim just made me cringe. So I set out to fix them up immediately. I first painted the wood trim using the leftover paint from when we painted the “living area.” Then I drilled in some cabinet pulls, the cheapest ones from Ikea, $2 for a pack of six I think it was. Anyway here are the before and after shots:

so my boyfriend and i just recently moved into our first very own apartment. it’s in a beautiful part of los angeles called silverlake, unfortunately it is an extremely small space. our livingroom/kitchen/office area are all one room, and are about the size of our bedroom. i had some really high hopes to decorate and design the place, unfortunately i was just laid off from my job so our budget is pretty much non-existent. this will be a log of my (and sometimes my boyfriend’s) attempts to decorate, renovate, and re-design our pre-existing furniture and space using what little pocket change we can scrounge up.