My Fully Furnished Apartment

​Our US furniture was unworthy of being shipped to Paris. I had to start over. 

​For the first time, I was able to shop slowly and chose things I liked instead of deciding which Ikea sofa went with our garage-sale end tables. I scoured flea markets and furniture stores. I consulted Parisians and expats. Our shipment of American household goods (books, pictures, one piano, one armchair, and one coffee table) arrived months after we got the apartment. Therefore, I didn’t feel truly at home for a long time. I still felt like we were in an Airbnb and somebody was going to tell us to get out. Now it’s just about finished, and feeling more like home.

You may remember my post My Half-Furnished Apartment. We had lived in the apartment for just a few weeks when I wrote that, and now we have lived here eight months, so a lot has changed. Our household goods arrived in August, but the piano didn’t get here until November. It took more money, more paperwork, and a crane, and it arrived without some key parts such as screws to hold the lid on and that thingy that connects the pedal stand to the underside of the piano. Sam engineered some screws for the lid, but we’re still waiting on the pedals. I’ve been playing lots of Bach.

Here is the living room. I got the sofa at Habitat and the chairs and buffet from a Scandanavian antique shop called Scandishop. I am especially proud of the curtains because they were a good deal and I love the pattern. The guardien (kind of a super who is in charge of the building and everything that goes on in it, but in a good way) installed the curtains and wall sconces. I agonized over the wall sconces, wanting something as beautiful as the apartment itself to cover the light bulbs sticking out of the walls, but I finally gave up and went to Castorama, which is the French Home Depot. Sigh.

My sister, who is very good with design, suggested I get a tall ficus for this room and a big vase of something spiky for the mantle, since the ceilings are so high. However, these little turds have promised to poop in the ficus and push every vase off the mantle, so I’m waiting on that.

You know how Virginia Woolf said every woman needs a room of her own? Well, I finally have a room! This is it, and I love it. The sofa is from Habitat, and the coffee table and bookshelf with doors are from Scandishop. The open bookshelf is new, the desk and rug are from the flea market, the swivel chair is from Office Depot (they didn’t have delivery and I don’t have a car so I rolled it five blocks home from the store), and the green chair is the one I brought from California. My sister hung the pictures. I guess I could get a big vase for the mantle in here, because no cats are allowed in my room. Hmm.

The piano finally made it! It came up the front of the building dangling from a crane, through the living window on the right, and now lives in this room. Just waiting on that pedal thing. The desk is from Habitat. The buffet is from Ikea, because my desire to shelve the piano books got bigger than my desire to find the perfect bookshelf. In a moment of weakness, I resorted to Ikea. Don’t judge me. ​

The world’s longest hallway is a much pleasanter hike now that it has some nice pictures. My friend Kay helped me hang these pictures because I was too scared to put a hole in these beautiful walls. She helped me quiz the guardien on picture-hanging techniques in old walls, then she just took a hammer and did it. We all need friends like that. Extra credit--comment if you see any of your original artwork here.

We slept on futons for a long time because in France beds take a long time to arrive. The bed, nightstands, chair, and ottoman all came from Habitat.

The dining room is one of my favorite rooms. I got the table at an antique shop and the blue cabinet at the flea market. The yellow chair is from Habitat, and I put it there because the living room is too far away to hear the pasta boiling over, so I spend a lot of time reading in this chair, keeping an eye on what’s cooking. Kay and my sister hung these pictures, too. Again, comment if you see your original artwork in here.

The kitchen is small and far away from the rest of the house, but it works really well for the three of us. At Christmas, we had seven people and the kitchen worked just fine!

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Are you jealous? Well, let me help you with that.

Before I took these pictures, I stuffed the gym bags, coats, coffee table junk, and video game controllers behind the sofa. I moved the plastic bags of vegetables, shoes, laundry, and leftover Christmas decor into the hall and then put them back after the photos.

There are no pictures of the bathrooms because they are dirty and I would rather write a blog post than clean the bathrooms.

There is no picture of Kid 3’s room because it just looks like a teenagers bedroom (rumpled bed, books and clothes on floor, assorted dishes with crusty stuff, crooked curtains). It does have high ceilings, but that doesn’t overcome the mess. Stil, if a messy room is your only complaint about your teenager, you’re doing good.

I’m trying to create a feeling of leisure and elegance here and that was just not going to be possible if I took truthful pictures.

That’s also why there are no pictures of the dysfunctional exercise equipment and cat litter box in the piano room.

Or the closets.

I found a spoon under the couch this morning.  

I re-took the dining room pictures to cut out the wifi setup.

That cute coffee cup on my desk has dried gunk in the bottom.

Now that I’m done taking pictures, we can go back to our normal, slightly disorganized life. We may have high ceilings and parquet floors and crown molding with little animals in it, but it’s still just us.

I think I’ll order a pizza for dinner.