It's amazing

There is such a huge difference in getting an apartment here and getting one in the States. I imagine there are some slight differences throughout the States, but I guess it is mostly the same.

There is nothing in the apartment's here except in the bathroom, which has a toilet, sink and some form of shower, which may just be a nozzle in the wall and an inch high border on the floor in the shape of a shower to keep some of the water from flooding everywhere. (oh, some bathrooms might not have a sitting toilet, they may just have a hole in the floor... sort of an indoor outhouse!!!!)

There are no light fixtures, yet the room in every ceiling has a hole and wires hanging down for some sort of light fixture to be put in.

There is nothing in the kitchen at all except possibly a sink, and by sink, I mean the physical sink, but not any cabinet surrounding it. There are no cupboards or counters, no fridge, no oven/stove, and you must be crazy if you think there would be a dishwasher there.

The walls are not painted before you move in, so they can be in any sort of state depending on who lived there before you, and you are lucky if your grout isn't black from grime, in both kitchen and bathroom.

The windows will not be cleaned before you move in. Neither will the light switch plates or door handles.

And if you have a clean stairway/hallway outside your apartment, you are truly lucky.

We are buying anything and everything to be able to move in, though we can't buy it all at once. As you can imagine, having to buy all the appliances plus furniture and everything else is quite a task.

It is truly a herculean effort to move into an apartment if you don't have everything ready from a previous apartment. Next time we move it won't be so hard insha'Allah, as we will have already bought everything and will just need to cart if off to the new place! Though I'm sure there will still be cleaning involved. lol

Okay, some pictures!

This is a light fixture that I saw and absolutely fell in love with. I couldn't stop thinking about it for a while after we saw it. It was just gorgeous and the picture doesn't do it any justice at all.
The balls that are hanging are faceted crystal balls in a teardrop sort of shape. Mostly round but pointed at the top. And above the flat layer of crystal balls, are little crystal disks spaced out in the shape of a pyramid.
I can't remember if this was 2500 pounds or 3500 pounds, but either way it is currently out of our price range for a lamp. lol
And I'm not sure it would fit in our apartment in terms of style. But I still love it!



Here is a picture of my poor dirty floors. The painters made a huge mess while they were working. It should be getting cleaned up today.



We decided on painting our personal living room green and we should be putting carpets down on the floor so it won't look horrible next to the tile.
In any case, the color I picked out was kind of a light sea foam mossy green. A fairly pale shade. But when they painted it on, it turned out soooo bright!! This picture doesn't show you how bright it is for some reason but it was really horrid. Nothing you could live in.



This is another picture after they painted a couple of samples on the wall. You can't tell but the background color is the same scary green from the previous photo. I guess because of the lighting in the room it doesn't look as bad in this photo.
Anyways, we are going with the color that is painted in the smaller square sample, not the larger one, though they were both nice colors. The bottom was a little more blue but not exactly the color I would want.
I hope it turned out okay on the re-paint!! Green gone bad is no joke folks! lol



There are a couple of walls in the front area that we are painting a color that will um.. go with the floor. This shows two samples, a lighter and darker. We are going with the darker. It will be painted on the wall to the left of the samples, on the little piece of wall that the samples are painted on, and on the wall that the front door is on. I decided that the lighter color was too light and the darker was a better contrast for the floor.
Interestingly enough, the color on the wall to the right of the samples is the new overall color of the rest of the walls. If you see it next to the crown molding, which is white, it looks kind of like butter, but next to the two wall color samples, it makes the color look sort of ever so slightly pink. Weird.



Last, while I was waiting for them to paint samples yesterday, I was out on the balcony. This guy came by with his donkey and cart, the cart loaded with vegetables. I got a short video, maybe I'll upload it. You can hear him shouting out something in Arabic, which I assume was something like, "come buy my delicious fresh yummy vegetables, they are so cheap and you will love them". lol