Apartment tour — three weeks in

A few friends and family have been curious to see how our new apartment looks like, so here’s a post of how things are three weeks in.


(Right after drafting this post, a huge order of our kitchen and bathroom stuff arrived, meaning we now have bins and proper bathroom rugs (and we can now cook and use real plates and cutlery!)

I don’t want to retake photos and rewrite this post, lol. So these new additions won’t be included.)


Entryway area

The entryway is actually a bit awkward, as the first thing that greets you is the door to the main bathroom, as well as coming face-to-face with the linen closet.

Here’s the ‘master’ bathroom:

  • We have bath mats incoming from IKEA. For the meantime we’re using the rugs my mom got me from Kultura.
  • It’s such a challenge to keep the clutter at bay from the bathroom counter. We definitely need a few organisers. Ben thinks the tea towel next to the mirror is tacky. I’m eyeing to buy a bathroom trolley or small cabinet where the weighing scale is, but we might not need it after all.
  • I am not a fan of the ‘open’ shower. It was also like that in our brief Airbnb stay at St. Kilda. You get no respite from the cold air. Also I get too conscious of my movements in my worry that I am splashing too much water out of the tub.
  • To the right is the laundry. I initially wanted to name our washing machine, Washy 2, but I ended up calling her Miele Kunis. Ben is fine with this.
  • Also, washing machines weird me out here. It’s a different standard. The Philippines is more used to top-loaders, and we don’t run wash cycles for like, two hours. An hour is already long, and 90 minutes feel excessive.

Master bedroom

The next room you’ll see is the master bedroom:

I don’t know what the bed size is, but it’s not a king. The bed frame and mattress are Ben’s, since 2011–2012ish. Lamp and linen borrowed from Nikki. The room has an ‘alcove’ where my chest of drawers is.
  • The photo conveniently cuts off my suitcases to the left, which I haven’t fully unpacked. We don’t have enough hangers, OK. They’re coming from IKEA.
  • Off to the right is the wardrobe. Nothing special—no walk-in closets or anything. I notice wardrobes in modern homes here have mirrored doors. Must be a contemporary feature. Eliminates the need to buy mirrors.
  • On top of the headboard is our original Google Home from Singapore, CeraVe in the tub, and a book I’ve given up reading for the meantime. I mean, how could I read? I don’t have a nightstand or lamp. (Incoming from IKEA.)
  • I rarely moisturise / use lotion in Manila, but here the climate is markedly drier, and your skin almost prickles sometimes from the dryness. CeraVe in the tub wasn’t really remarkable for my face, despite its cult status in r/skincareAddiction, so I thought I’d use it as body lotion.
  • There will be large prints hanging above the headboard and the wall opposite the bed. Ben and I haven’t sorted out planning that aspect of our home yet.

Ben’s home office

Next to the bedroom is Ben’s home office:

Long desk, bookcase, and lamp from IKEA. Ben is very pleased with his setup.
  • We had a great little row over the bookcases, actually. We originally planned for it to be in the main room. However, I had not anticipated just how large Ben’s book collection is (even though he often talked about it). Nonetheless having them live in his study was a great decision as it set the ambience of his office / study / man-cave.
  • Off to the left of the desk is the wardrobe. They all look the same across all bedrooms.
  • On the lowest shelf of the leftmost bookcase you can see where I messed up the assembly—the wood grain is exposed. The mistake couldn’t be undone as the plywood attaches to the frame by nails… on the lowest shelf. So it effectively ruined the side that’s supposed to be exposed. It’s annoying because I was the one directing and guiding Ben on the bookcase assembly and when I did the third one on my own I figured I knew what I was doing.

Behind the desk, against the wall, are our combined stack of prints, photos, and things that go on walls:

You can’t see it, but Ben has a few choice Andy Kehoe prints, including one I got him for his birthday in 2019. Off to the back you can glimpse the cross-stitch Nikki gifted us for our wedding. There’s also the actual PVC boards we used at our wedding, showing the venue details / order of events as well as the bar selection we had during the cocktail hour.

Main area–kitchen, dining and lounge

Once you’re past the door to Ben’s office, the apartment opens up to the kitchen and main room—bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s very lovely, but it also means you can’t walk around the main room naked. Mostly at night:

The super picturesque kitchen counter from my last post is, in reality, well, a bit cluttered. The acacia bowl is from Crate & Barrel in Manila and serves as a drop-off counter for all the jangly bits you take with you when you come and go. (Since settling in here I have ceased to use bags and purses and instead rely on my coats and pockets when running errands.)
  • We still don’t have bins yet, hence the plastic bag next to the kettle! Ben also initially resisted the idea of a dish rack, but to be honest there are still so many instances where we wash dishes by hand.
  • The oven and dishwasher came built-in. Every house has a staging area. In ours it’s this kitchen island, as well as our dining table.
  • So much pantry space! But we do need to be smart with organising… Otherwise it’ll all be a dump.
  • The overhead cupboards are a bit unusable to me. I’m just not tall enough. (I mean, I can reach the edge of the high shelf! But that’s it.) We legit may need to buy a small stepladder.
To the right of the kitchen, coming from the entryway, the main room opens up.
  • Dinner table and shoe bench from IKEA. The ‘tablecloth’ is a few yards of batik cloth Ben got me from Bali years ago, which I had promised to turn into a dress. We wanted to protect the wood and I found a good use for the cloth in the interim. Ben thinks it’s tacky though and should only be there until we get proper placemats.
  • The dinner table extends an extra two feet give or take. The design is pretty clever in that there are no visible lines, breaks, or moveable parts when the table is ‘retracted’.
  • I love the shoe bench. It’s from the Tjusig line in IKEA. It has a matching overhead hat rack, but we haven’t gotten around to assembling it as we would need to nail / drill / screw it to the wall.
  • Oh, and the rubbish. Turns out ordering eleventy billion furnitures, appliances, and personal implements generates a lot of packaging waste! Our building sorts cardboard recycling but honestly there’s just so much and it’s such a drag to take them to the basement floor.
Immediately opposite the previous photo is the lounge area. Well, when our couch arrives. What looks like a golden-hour glow is just sunlight reflected off of the building opposite in the photo.
  • To the far corner is Ben’s old dining table, which currently serves as a staging area for when we’re assembling furniture. The old dining chairs serve as our ‘couch’ for the meantime. The coffee table came in early. There are a few boxes containing stuff for charity, as well as a miscellaneous box we haven’t unpacked yet.
  • The shelves were the first thing of IKEA I bought here, two years ago. It had cloth drawer inserts which we moved to the linen closet. Some boxes I’m keeping ‘just in case’, for warranty purposes? I don’t know, it may just be a hang-up.
  • The lighting doesn’t show it, but in addition to Ben’s D.Va Funkos on the top shelf there is a terracotta warrior replica below it. Ben said the whole thing could be a display shelf.
Here’s the floor TV I’ve referenced in previous posts. The wall dwarfs it a bit, but when we first bought it we found the size quite staggering, at 65 inches.
  • If you’re Melburnian and are a bit sharp you can see the top of the State Library of Victoria peeking out of the corner of the window.
  • For the fun of it, I showed Ben a routine I created on our Home assistant: ‘Hey Google, I’m home’ prompts her to turn the TV and Xbox on. It worked a few times, then Ben tried to tweak it and then the Xbox failed to detect and the Nest Hub in the kitchen doesn’t play well with our 5 GHz Wi-Fi network.
  • Door on the left leads to my home office. Door to the right leads to an enclosed balcony.

My home office

Let’s go to my home office:

This is a tricky angle—I’m standing right behind the door. To my right is the wardrobe. The room looks out to the balcony, accessible via sliding door. The annoying thing about this room is that because of its layout, there is actually only one useable corner of the room, where my desk is. Any other corner will cut across one of three doors, not to mention the wardrobe.
  • The rental provider actually lists this room as the master, likely due to the attached bathroom and access to the balcony. But it’s just markedly smaller, and Ben doesn’t like the bathroom.
  • I couldn’t be bothered to unpack the boxes. We’re still missing a lot of key storage furniture, and these items just won’t have a place to live. I need a proper filing cabinet for our family documents, office supplies, and my ‘box of memories’.
  • I feel like I have to choose between a dedicated home office (with a filing cabinet and intelligent storage) and a hybrid loungey guest room. I spent an inordinate amount of time taking painstaking measurements of the room to try to maybe fit a daybed / guest trundle bed. It would work by bisecting the room a bit between the balcony half and bathroom half. I don’t know…

A close-up of my workstation:

Pardon the lighting. It was quite a dreary morning.
  • I’m currently using two desks—Ben’s interim one and mine. They’re both inexpensive and quick to deliver. Interestingly, this setup marks off the perimeter of my incoming Bekant desk from IKEA, almost to the centimetre. The left-corner shape works very well for me. I do jot down things during the day. The height difference between desks is surprisingly tangible. If I have time, I might switch the two desks.
  • When I move around my desk during my workday, I keep seeing this picture (source) in my mind’s eye, from that human factors course I took in uni. In spite of my disdain for Apple’s shameless consumerist branding I just might get the Magic Trackpad. For ergonomics.
  • I still have my old scientific calculator from my final year in uni. (I lost two in previous years—sci cals were a high-value commodity and theft was common.) Call me old-fashioned, but I find it faster to whip out a calculator when performing basic sums / simple algebra than to unlock your phone, find the calculator app, and tap the wrong button…
  • I still have the same black pencil case my mom got me in high school. Also the ring light Ben got me last Christmas. The Macbook camera performs so well that I hadn’t used my Logitech webcam since. But evening calls in low light still needs some lighting.

Let’s go to the second bathroom.

  • I’ve taken to showering here on some mornings, because the stall’s at least enclosed, unlike the other one. Plus, helps me and Ben not get in each other’s way when the morning’s hectic.
  • As Ben was never going to use this bathroom, I’ve assigned it as my makeup area. I haven’t figured out how to store and stash things intelligently, but I’m not in a hurry.
  • The oriental print is Ben’s. I’ve appropriated it for here.

Balcony

After that, there’s just the balcony left:

Photo taken much earlier—my monitor hadn’t yet arrived so I was using Chris’ old one. Here you can see nearly the entire length of the balcony, as well as the wardrobe reflecting the outside. My desk cuts across the sliding door, but it doesn’t really affect access.
  • I have plans for the balcony, but it’s the least priority in my budget. I imagine a small table and two chairs, maybe a small plants shelf to the left wall. During the days of the move Ben, Nikki and Chris all went here to chat and smoke. Ben has since quit and we also realised that even if you kept the doors closed the cigarette smoke permeated into the apartment anyway, quickly enveloping it with the smell.
  • I find it very annoying that the balcony is bare—it has no lighting fixtures or power outlets. It has a drain. Go figure.
  • Right now I just use the old dinner chairs for hanging laundry. Yeah, our clothes racks are still under way from IKEA.

So, there’s our apartment. I hope you enjoyed the tour. Growing up I never quite understood people who were always apologising for the state of their home. Maybe because when I spent time at friends’ houses they were not fussed about showing their lives to me—clutter and funny spaces and all.

I hope to make this a mini-series, documenting our home as more of our furniture arrives and we make the space more liveable. It’ll stop when the deliveries taper off, I don’t know when. Advent is around the corner. Can we afford to house a Christmas tree at the moment? Hmm.


Many thanks to Chris A and family, for the housewarming gift. You’re always looking out for us. Salamat.