Salmon anyone?

Well, although I didn't get the pictures done last night, I made myself do them this morning. lol
I don't know what it is that makes me so lazy here. I'll call it a lack of decent oxygen and leave it at that. :D

Hubby is going over to the apartment today with an electrician to make sure that the place can handle all of our electric needs. And if it can't, then he'll have the guy fix up whatever needs fixing.

We're still discussing different design ideas. I think we need a mansion for all the things we'd like to implement. lol

Our personal living room, which will be in the 2nd bedroom, will have wall to wall carpet put in. I think this is the only room that we'll be doing that in. It frees us up to buy whatever furniture we wish and then match the carpet/walls to the furniture. You'll understand when you see the floors in the place why this would be a challenge without putting down carpet.

I'd like to find some nice tapestries for our bedroom walls, though there is no definite plan in the bedroom yet. We'd like to get a custom built closet insert type of thing, that we can put on the wall. I mean, there's no closet in the room, but we don't really want to buy a huge wardrobe for everything and the closet inserts that you design yourself would be nice. Hubby has a friend who makes them and he will give the guy a call and see what we can do.

The bathroom, in my opinion, really just needs to be razed. lol
However, in the interest of expenses, time and sanity, we will just be replacing some items. The toilet I believe, and not sure about the sink. The tub should be replaced but I'm not sure if that's in our budget just yet. All of the fixtures will definitely be replaced, and we will need to get some good lighting in there.
Whoever lived here previously, and maybe whoever lived there before them, etc, did not seem keen on cleaning the grout in the tiles, and since the whole house is tiled, well... you know... ugh.
Although hubby had someone come in and clean the place the other day, and it looks much better, I am looking forward to scrubbing the grout in both the bathroom and kitchen. It seems that people don't do that here. They just wash the floor with water/disinfectant. I really don't understand it, but oh well.

The kitchen is completely tiled, except for the ceiling. To tell you the truth, it gives me the creeps a little bit. It's like a morgue or a hospital or something. lol
I don't understand the concept of tiling the walls all the way up to the ceiling, particularly when the ceilings are so high. You would need a ladder to clean up there, whereas with paint, you can just use a broom or something and brush any dust/cobwebs.
Anyways, hubby says the kitchen won't be so bad once we get cabinets in but I am reserving the right to disagree. lol

I wish the balcony were a little bit bigger. It's a nice place for the two of us to sit but if we have two chairs out there, there won't really be any room for plants. I thought about hanging plants over the side of the balcony railing, but the people below us and above us hang their laundry out to dry on their railings, and I don't want dirty water dripping from out plants onto someone's clean clothing.
Not sure what we'll do.

The floor looks really nice now that it's been cleaned up. I'm not sure how easy it will be to keep clean. We shall see.

I hope that didn't sound too horrible. Like I'm complaining about everything. The apartment is great, but we just need to fix some things and make it "ready". I do like the space and insha'Allah we'll be comfortable there.

So, after all that blabbing, how about some pictures? :D
I have 11 to post, though I took many more. I just didn't want to overload anyone who has dial-up. As always you can click on the picture if you want a bigger view.

The first two pictures are of the kitchen. They are taken from opposite corners. The piece of tile slab that has been caulked to the kitchen sink will be coming out faster than you can say, "cheap shabby half arsed way to have a counter". lol
The window is nice and should be a good way to air out the kitchen if needed. I don't think it gets too much sun directly down that shaft so it should be cool enough.



second view of kitchen



Next we have the view down the hall while standing in the kitchen entryway.
The first doorway on the right is the bathroom, the second doorway on the right is the bedroom, and the door straight down is the living room. Off to the left is the divided reception area (it's in two areas).



Next we have a view of the bathroom. You're lucky that the light isn't working in there. Seriously. Though I do like the pattern on the floor, it's kind of cute.



On to the bedroom. You can see the tiny balcony at the back, big enough for a couple of people to stand in and not do anything else. lol



Then we have a view from the bedroom door looking at the reception areas. To the left is where the front door is, kind of across from where the balcony is.



Here is a view looking from the corner of the reception back towards the bedroom door. Kind of the opposite view from the picture before. The balcony will be on the left and the front door towards the right.



Here is my sweety pie sitting on the balcony. This was taken from the front door area. The two reception areas are quite large actually, it's a nice space. We have several ideas for what we'll do.



Here is a view from just inside the apartment looking out of the balcony. If you look at the floor, you can see how deep the balcony is.



This was taken at the edge of the balcony just to show a closer view of the neighborhood/street view. This is from 4 stories up.



And last is a picture of our ugly front door. lol
I'm glad this is on the outside and not the inside. However, we are planning to paint it or put a thin veneer on it. I was wondering how it would look to match the door to the inside floor tiles. Background a dark gray with the squares painted a salmon color. But, that might be a bit much. :D We shall see. Something needs to be done with it, no matter what. You can't tell that good, but the squares and frame have these little tan flecks painted in and it's just really ugly.



We are getting prices on a/c's and will hopefully be looking at couches and washing machines and other things soon. We decided that the bed will be 180 cm's by 2 meters. I think that's what it is. I'm not too familiar with that form of measurement. I mention it because you can order the bed size here by the size you want, not just the standard single, double, queen, etc. It's nice I guess, except if you order a size that isn't so normal, how do you get sheets that fit? lol

Next time I'm there I'll try to take some short videos since the longer one we took isn't uploading to youtube right. Plus, it was a pretty large file.

Hubby really thinks we'll be able to move in within a week or two. I am not holding my breath. I will be happy if we manage to get in before Ramadan starts. :D