My New Apartment and its Humble Beginnings as a Rainbow Cave

Ever since I finished my MA thesis, writing has been incredibly painful for me. So painful, in fact, that I can barely write emails! If I have to write more than a few sentences, I have to take a break, go get some chocolate or walk around the block, and then come back in to write another paragraph. And this, my friends, is why I have written very little on my blog since June. Thankfully I only have to write a little at work, and it is in very short sentences or occasionally a short paragraph, so it's giving me time to recover.

Recover from what, you might ask. Well. If simply saying "I'm a recovering grad school addict" was not answer enough for why my brain is fried and my motivation shot, I'll have you know that in the last two years I have moved 12 times between 3 countries/territories and three states, I took graduate classes at 3 universities in 3 countries/territories and in 3 different languages, did a 2-year MA program in one year, and wrote a 101 page thesis in a month. ONE month. So I got a little burned out after grad school, and writing was one of the things that took the hardest hit.

And if you think I'm being a bit extreme, I feel like it's kind of like giving blood. You have to wait a little bit after giving blood to give blood again, right? Because your body needs to replenish its store of blood. I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that it felt like grad school, and especially the period of time spent writing my thesis, felt like one long blood-letting process. I clearly needed some time to replenish my energy supply before I could write again.

So what have I been doing with myself for the past few months? Giving my new apartment a complete makeover! My very cheap, well-below-market-value apartment in an incredibly convenient location (and did I mention that I have my OWN apartment? That's the best part!!) had some issues. A LOT of issues. And after I had the landlord replace the doors (the front door was a bedroom door, with no deadbolt and no threshold or weather stripping! Disgusting bugs were waltzing into my apartment THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR!), fix the air conditioning (who doesn't want to go through August in DC with a broken A/C?), and fix the ceiling lights (their wires had rusted through), I decided to tackle the walls. 

Now, I am sure that there are a lot of people that would love to move into a basement apartment with a lime green-dark grey-white-yellow-dark navy blue paint job, but I felt like I was living in a disgusting rainbow cave. In case you wonder what it would be like to live in such a rainbow cave, here are a few pictures of before and after-the-primer.

Special thanks to Ginette, who helped me paint the kitchen. Isn't that lime green just amazing?

Kitchen post-primer

Bathroom cave. 70's pink tub, toilet, and sink, and dark navy blue walls. Totally fashionable.

I liked to call this yellow "fever yellow" because it made the lighting in the front room look sickly

And special thanks to Julie who helped me paint the front room!

I know that you are all dying to see the "after" pictures, but I'm going to save those for the next post. It was a crazy long process, y'all, and I'm going to let you experience some of that "is this ever going to end and will my walls ever look normal" feeling for yourself. Also that was a lot of writing, and it's time for me to take a break now. :)