Having covered the most important room in my last post, on we go for a tour of the less important rooms of our new apartment. As in the last post, I did not clean/put order before taking photographs. This is pretty much how it looks like on a regular basis in here. Of course the ad online didn’t advertise a sewing space. So what caught my interest instead was a picture of the following room:
Living Area – Includes kitchen, dining and living room
It seemed different from what is usually available on the market here. In most of the apartments we went to see, the kitchen was separate from the eating/living space. So seeing an apartment with an open floor plan was like finding a special snowflake. 😉 Add to that the sloped ceiling, which gives this apartment it’s spacious feel:
Living Area – View from the kitchen corner
Though I must say it looked a lot more coordinated furniture wise than these pictures. What can I say, it’s a work in progress. And if I wait until it’s finished, you will very probably never get to see it. 😀
Another unusual feature is the upstairs loft, which is visible in the second picture. The ceiling there is only 1.55m high and it therefore doesn’t count as living space. But when I saw it I immediately thought “children’s playroom”! In each of the three smaller rooms there is a ladder leading up to the loft:
Ladder To The Loft – This is the one from PHD’s office
Yes, three smaller rooms. Another unusual thing in Finnish apartments. Average apartments here have two bedrooms. I guess people looking for something bigger look for a house with garden. Since we don’t have time/expertise to take care of either house or garden, we were focusing on apartments. Which, as I said, are usually 2 bedroom affairs. This one has 4 bedrooms in total, which makes it an extra special snowflake.
It’s too big, to be honest, but it seemed quite impossible to find the goldilocks apartment with three bedrooms in the areas we were looking at. But of course we managed just fine filling all of the rooms! 😀
As seen from the picture above, one of the rooms serves as PHD’s office. The next one is going to be the bean’s bedroom, once he sleeps on his own (and once we stopped using it as a dumping ground…):
Bean’s Room
It has already changed a bit in appearance since I took these pics (in October). I try to let him have his daytime naps in there so he gets used to sleeping in there. I hope this will make the transition easier, once it is time.
The last room in this row is the guest room:
Guestroom
Just like in our last apartment, this was the room that was finished first. So if you will ever visit, this is what you will get. 🙂
All the artwork you can see in these pictures were done by my grandfather. He was quite prolific, though never found his own style. Therefore there are a lot of painting styles I could choose from. I love the works of his that focus on a few textured colours, like the one hanging in our bedroom:
Bedroom
The fact that both the chair and curtains coordinate with the painting is a happy accident. The chair itself is another heirloom from my grandparents.
I know I said that we didn’t want to deal with a garden. However, when this apartment turned out to have one, we didn’t really mind. Probably also because “garden” is stretching the definition a bit… Basically the back goes towards a wooded area, which gives us the green (now white) views of a garden, without much work involved. Conveniently there is also a terrace:
I truly love living here and consider ourselves extremely lucky to have found this gem! The only drawback is that I don’t ever want to move away… 🙂 (We are also very lucky to be living in an area where housing is still affordable. In Paris, Rome or even Zürich the same amount of money would have bought us something not even half this size. Granted, Jyväskylä is far from being as fabulous a city as these, but being the country chick I am, I even kind of prefer it this way.)
I hope you liked this tour of our home! And as you can see, there’s still space for guests, so come and visit while you can! 😉
lazylinchen 