My Humble Abode

I live in a gorgeous condominium over-looking the bay between Brickell and the Design District, about two blocks from the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. This is the view up as you lounge by the pool in the sunshine. (Which I do so often.)

I live in a teensy-tiny studio, but it’s mine, all mine, and I love it.  Nobody drinks my beer or uses up my shampoo or leaves messes for me to clean up!

Prior to moving to Miami, I never bothered to spend much time decorating – when you are a college student sharing small communal living spaces with multiple people, all with different taste and preferences, you go for cheap, functional, and unlikely-to-be-broken.  Everything I owned came from Ikea (which fit the first two criteria, but not the third).  Now, I have the space to decorate, but not particularly the budget.  I became a voracious reader of design blogs such as The Lettered Cottage and Holly Mathis Interiors, both of whom have an aesthetic that I love, and tried to make my apartment an (albeit temporary) home.  (Note: sometimes while reading The Lettered Cottage I am tempted to go out and buy white paint and paint everything I own white….but then i talk myself of out if. My dark cherry wooden furniture is too nice as is – even the stuff from Ikea.)  Sometimes I am successful, but more often than not, I need help:

Because my budget is limited, I try to buy things at thrift stores, flea markets, and my favorite: Marshall’s.  Decorating helps me to keep my obscene amounts of clutter to a minimum and forces me to use a critical eye on all of the things that I hoard keep that I do not really need.

______________________

UPDATE:

______________________

Here is what my apartment looks like now: