big love in a tiny apartment

for me, home isn’t about a place, it’s about a feeling of comfort and safety that usually comes from a person.  jon felt familiar after just a couple days together, and he felt like home within a few short weeks.  i said yes when he asked me to move to the country with him, and i said yes again when he asked me to move to minneapolis just a year later.

all that said, i try to make wherever we are living feel like home by filling the space with things that recall special moments for us.  you probably already realize I’m a romantic, but i’m not just romantic about my love life, i’m romantic about life in general – including the making of memories, the warmth of home, and the way we live our lives.

the title of this post perfectly describes our living situation, and the following pictures provide a preview of the way we fill out tiny apartment with a big love:

when you walk in, you can walk one of three ways in this tiny apartment: right to the bathroom, straight to the combined living room/dining room/kitchen, or left (you’ll have to hop) into the bedroom.

before we met, jon was living quite the bachelor lifestyle, and didn’t have any furniture at all.  he told me that he called macy’s and ordered a bed and a couch on the way home from our first date.  just thinking about what was going on in his head makes me smile… 🙂

even though we live in uptown minneapolis, our view makes it feel like it’s a pretty cozy neighborhood:one of my favorite things about the apartment is the artwork that we have on the walls.  this collection of items reminds me of our wedding (a wedding photo, our marriage certificate, and a watercolor map of the farm we were married on):we found the following print of the chicago skyline at summerfest in milwaukee.  it’s really neat because the artist made the entire thing out of chicago magazine and newspaper clippings:some of my other favorite items include this farm table that jon ordered for me as a surprise after we moved to the country:the etching on on flower vas:our silly sponges that make me smile when i do the dishes:a watercolor print of the two of us (look familiar?):a ringbox that i painted now holds our toothbrushes:kinzie is in the post for good measure:when i finished taking pictures for this series, i realized that the first note that i ever gave jon was stuffed in a kitchen drawer.  i decided to put it on display by making a flower magnet — probably the easiest craft of all time.  if you want to make your own, just glue a magnet to one side of a clothing pin, and then decorate the other side with a flower: