Munster Apartment

How about a tour of our new place?

I must warn you, it's small! It's 25 square meters, which translates to somewhere in the neighborhood of 260 square feet. Our last apartment was 1000 square feet, so we are working with a lot less room here. We're here for a year, and we didn't bring our things from home with us and there's a decent amount of storage, so it works, but I was definitely surprised when I discovered how tiny it was. Although I expected it, I've never been one for being able to visualize the square footage of something. 

Anyway, this is our building. There's a lovely garden around it. I don't think the building itself is beautiful, but I really like the yard!

Behind us is a building of the university. There's a library (there are many libraries for different departments all over the city, which can be confusing) and I think some student housing. We're in housing for international students and visiting scholars, so I guess it makes sense to have university buildings right there too. This pond is behind our apartment and it is not beautiful.

Here's the backyard. I feel like this will be really enjoyable in the summer.

Inside the building, there's a little foyer with our mailboxes, then another door, then the stairs upstairs and to the basement (where the laundry room lives). To the left is our landlord's apartment (it's large) and then to the right is another glass door which leads to our hallway. I haven't had a reason to poke around upstairs, but I would guess it's just like this, although perhaps with a hallway on either side?

That's our "front door" through the glass here.

Our apartment came furnished which was a really great blessing. Our bedding is a little childish, but it came with two sets of sheets and two sets of duvet covers (we each have our own duvet, which is awesome for me because Carson is a cover thief).

Think about the size of the average coat closet and you've got the size of our kitchen. A friend of ours came to visit and she remarked that she was surprised how tiny it actually was. It looks much smaller in person, if you can believe that. Dishes were included and all we bought here was the food, dish soap and the broom (it came with a tiny broom but even in a small apartment, those are hard to manage).

Here's the view looking in from outside our living room window. This is how it was set up when we moved in, but shortly after we moved in, I rearranged things to make room for our new couch (we bought it to be able to have a place for people to sleep when they came to visit). This is the only picture I took of our living room arrangement before.

We got a couch that can actually sleep people, and now we changed things around. The red couch before was cute but it couldn't be used as a bed, and it also had a lot of stains on it, so Carson found us another one at a secondhand store. The arms fold down and it's cozy. The day it arrived, I was testing it out and ended up falling asleep. 

After we got our couch, things didn't fit the same way. I really reorganized things and put the bookcase in our bedroom, moved the table from in front of the living room window to the corner where the shelves used to be, moved the shelves to where the bookshelves used to be, moved a dresser from the wall in the bedroom to on top of another dresser to make room for the bookcase. I thought I might kill myself, not because it was heavy but because I have really short arms, but I survived.

It may not be roomy, but it's big enough! When we first were searching online we looked at studios and while the space was about the same, it's nice having a designated living room separate from the bedroom - less clutter, and better for having visitors. It works for us!