Back in the spring as our lease was nearly up, Kevin and I thought about moving. While we didn't actually look at any apartments in person, from my online searches there didn't appear to be anything easily found that met our requirements. And so we decided to stay put.

Around November, we some how got to discussing our living room furniture and Kevin expressed that he'd like to upgrade the room. This was great news to me because I really like rearranging furniture and redesigning rooms. In addition, it meant that we could stop using the "floor couch." (Our 3-person Ektorp Ikea couch in November 2009 suffered an unrepairable crack along the main support beam that could only be rectified by removing the couch's feet and sitting the couch directly on the floor. This meant sitting about 6 inches closer to the ground which was odd at first. We wanted to get a new couch immediately, but since it was the holiday season delayed and delayed until a year later!) This was also more great news for me because we got to go to my favorite store--Ikea!!!

It was the most amazing Ikea trip ever... we only spent $30. But we tried out lots of couches and chairs and tables and bookcases deciding what we wanted.

In the end, we completely redid the living room with a corner couch, 2 new chairs, and 2 new bookcases. We moved a few of the existing pieces to new locations and the "floor couch" and poang chairs went into the 2nd bedroom, which is really more of a second living room now.

Here's a little taste of the new room:

We had the new living room set up before x-mas and our Vermont vacation. But the second living room/bedroom was a mess of furniture and junk. For a small room, it has taken me 2 weeks to get it in order, and I still have a small pile of papers and stuff to sort and recycling to take out before it is fully finished.

The most exciting thing for me about fixing up the second room is that I finally have book shelf space for all of my knitting books and magazines!!

(Can you tell from these 2 pictures that we have a ton of books?! And that's not even all of them! Also, ignore that yellow crocheted blanket to the right... that's hiding the horrible tower of air conditioners.)

All of this cleaning also helped me to unearth 5 old gift cards that have about $100 on them. Of course, the reason the gift cards went missing in the first place was because they are to stores/restaurants that we don't go to often, but now that I've found them, I'm going to be sure that someone uses them!!