Our First Beijing Apartment.

The company that my husband works for places families directly into an apartment. As in, they pick you up from the airport and take you straight to the apartment where you will be living in for the coming year. There is no say in what place you get, you just have to hope for the best. The apartment comes furnished, and you do not get pictures of what it will look like before you step foot into the place. Which means, you are not able to prepare for what is to come. Since I am a lover of design, having a home that is aesthetically pleasing and in a style that I am comfortable with is extremely high on my list. You can imagine my trepidation when we were brought to an apartment I would never have picked out if I had been given a choice.

As soon as the door closed on the person from the HR Department, Mr Julie Ann Events and I were stripping the apartment of everything that was not in my design scheme and we were rearranging furniture around for a better sense of feng shui. A trip to our trusty Ikea (all expats favorite box store) and the arrival of our shipment from Hong Kong, and we had our new apartment looking the way we wanted it to.

We were thankful to be moving from under 400 square feet in Hong Kong into a three bedroom apartment. Our kids had never really experienced the joys of having their own rooms before, so this was foreign territory that they were walking. We shipped our whole house in Hong Kong to Beijing, and the bedroom furniture from our one bedroom apartment went straight into our son's new room. Our daughter's bedroom already had furniture in the apartment when we moved in, so we tried to personalize the room as much as possible to make her feel cozy and comfortable.

Our master bedroom was a luxury to have again as space was so limited back in Hong Kong. It was exciting to have an ensuite bathroom with a bathtub! Again, the bedroom furniture in our master bedroom came with the apartment, so we personalized it with thick bedding, a new mattress topper, wall art, and plenty of plants!