Category — Home Decor

We Live Here

by Gillian

For the first month or so after we got married, Brian and I had a habit of elbowing each other and saying, “Hey, you know what?… We’re married.” The novelty of that hasn’t quite worn off, but now we’ve moved on to a new catchphrase: “Hey, you know what? We live here.”

We are officially residents of Kailua, Hawaii. We signed the lease on our place last week and have been just tickled pink with it (one of us is pinker than the other).

Sometimes we just need to lie on the living room floor and love our new apartment

After more than a year of separations, cross-country/cross-continent moves and stints of living out of a suitcase, we are finally going to have a real home. Together. I won’t even know what to do with all that time I used to spend pining. Some ideas:

Painting our awesome apartment
Refurbishing furniture and being generally crafty with decorating
Using every single kitchen gadget, utensil and dish we got for our wedding
Planting vegetables and herbs in boxes on the lanai and trying not to kill them (this is where Brian comes in)
Grilling every kind of fish and crustacean we can get our hands on (our first culinary experiment with shark went swimmingly… tee hee)
Becoming masters of urban composting
Finally printing, framing and hanging photos of our friends and family from the last five years
Turning our second bedroom into a sweet-tastic office, silkscreening studio and guest room

Oh, you want to see photos of where you’ll be staying when you come visit? If you insist.

Front door: Soon our New Orleans flag will be proudly waving there

Kitchen: Flat-top range and a dishwasher? Could life get any better?

Living room/dining room: Where our dining table, sectional sofa and future flat-screen TV (the first TV I will have ever bought myself after years of using hand-me-downs) will reside

Living room looking out onto the lanai: We’ll be leaving that door open a lot to let in the ocean breeze

Lanai: Brian contemplates where the grill and the hammock will go

Master bedroom: Large closet and a door out onto the lanai

Master bathroom: It’s not huge, but it has two sinks, so I am stoked

Since we found the place so early in our week-long stay, we decided to get a jump-start on painting before our furniture arrives. We discovered there is a Hardware Hawaii just down the street from us (a fact that made Brian downright giddy), so we picked out some colors, bought supplies and got to work. Gray-blue for the master bedroom, warm cream for most of the living room and kitchen and dark red for two small accent walls in the living room. We’re still accepting suggestions for the bathrooms, the hallway and the office.

I am an artiste

I graciously allow Brian to do the meticulous ceiling work

It looks as though a terrible crime were committed in our living room

Awesome! Our landlady was a little skeptical of the red, but she relented, saying red is a “good Chinese color”… and then later asking us if we will paint over it before we move