Furnishing II: moving from paper to reality

We're in the space. Now what? (83)

About a month ago, we wrote about furnishing our new apartment. That was the theory - the back-of-the-napkin sketches and ideas. Now, we’ve been living in the new place for nine days and are carefully adding and arranging furniture. We’re taking it slow, waiting to see what this new space tells us to do.

We started with a mattress on the floor, two bedside tables, a poof, a camping stool, and emptied moving boxes to serve as tables. This morning, we unpacked and broke down the last of the moving boxes.¹ With those finally out of the way, we can clearly see the space as a whole for the first time.

We’re really struggling with the small Great Room/Room with a View. The combined kitchen, dining room, living room is huge when you’re standing in it empty, but somehow shrinks dramatically when you put even a camping stool in it.

Courtesy real estate company

First, we’ve never had a view before. Here, we have not one but two windows that distract us from our daily tasks. One has birds and trees and some city and acres of sky. The other, smaller, window is what most people would consider the money shot - straight across downtown Lisbon. We can’t say which one we like better. Day or night, we’ll just sit from time to time and look out the windows. Have we mentioned we’ve never lived with a view before? The most we’ve had is a decent house across the street. This blows us away. Building around those views is obviously priority.

And it’s also something we have no idea how to do. Where do we put the couch? In front of the tv? The windows? We had two chairs in front of the windows and the small - 2 person - couch in front of the tv² and the room just looked cluttered, busy, and full. We’re bound and determined to let the space breathe - to not clutter it up too much. If anyone has a suggestion - give us a shout!

The smaller window furthest from the kitchen

Window from the kitchen side. The birds love this.

The kitchen is pretty wretched. There’s almost zero storage in the bottom cabinets. Place for pots/pans/cookie trays/lasagna pans/tupperware/dog food - nope. So we started with an island.

If it’s not open, we can’t store anything in it (dishwasher, fridge, washing machine). The far left cabinets are just a couple of inches deep.

We were aghast at how much space a moderate island ate up. We have come up with storage solutions that include the tv cabinet and a nook around the corner and we think that will work. Phew. Island disaster averted.

Now we just need to figure out where the table will go. We have a nice stand-in for the extendable dining room table - a 6’ folding table that will be great for big dinners and board game nights. But we’re having trouble figuring out where that will go. Again - how to use the view.

A big concern coming here was that storage wouldn’t be sufficient. Fortunately - except for the kitchen - it turns out to not be a problem. We’re still glad we got the magic bed frame of storage. It’s perfect for large items we don’t want to lift over our head like our Christmas tree and dehumidifier. The bed frame is eager to do its job – if the mattress is not on it, it rises in the air on its own. The space inside is huge. Our few items feel tiny in there. And it is much easier to get at things than we expected. You practically just think bed, can you open, and it’s leaping up.

Looks like we could squeeze one or two more things in here.

The bathroom has two pull-out drawers that manage to poorly use the fairly decent amount of space in the cabinets. Two pull-out drawers. That’s it. Turns out we’ve done a pretty good job of cramming what we need in them, though. We’d love to buy two more of the storage bins that help define the drawer, but for some reason they aren’t being delivered to Portugal now. ?? What the hey?

The bedrooms have huge closets that do not believe in long clothes. They’re also shallow, so the clothes rod is not side to side like we’re used to. Instead you hang the clothes on the bar and it pushes in and out. The rest is cubbies and drawers. A surprising amount is fitting in the closets. Yay!

Never had a rod that pulls out of the closet before.

We’re getting there. Still a way to go, but we’re getting there.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Amy & Scott

1. Easily the fastest “move in” we’ve ever had. It helps greatly that we had relatively little stuff and almost none of it belongs in some sort of permanent storage.

2. The architect helpfully located our tv for us by placing all the necessary outlets and plugs in one spot. It’ll be nice, but it also means the tv has to go on that wall. Or is that what we want? Hmmmm.