Our Final Apartment In Beijing.

Two years in Beijing, two different apartments.... That's way more moving than I would voluntarily choose. But when you get kicked out of your apartment thanks to your landlord deciding they wanted to move back in, you have no other choice but to move! We experienced some drama with one apartment falling through and ended up with our backs against the wall.  This apartment was our only option. You go through experiences to point you in certain directions and after that apartment debacle, we made our decision that this would be our final year in Beijing. With that in mind, we didn't want to invest too much in an apartment we knew we would only live in for one year. However, we also wanted to make sure we felt completely at home in it.

Once again, as an expat not really being able to have a choice in which apartment you live, you are left with what you can get. And this apartment was no exception of making lemonade out of lemons. To stay within our budget, we went down from a three bedroom to a two bedroom in the same apartment complex we had been living in. I was once again thankful to have a storage room to cleverly stack any unwanted furniture that came with the apartment and did not flow with my current style. And truth be told, it is a fun challenge to make a house truly your own... maybe not 4 years in a row, but never the less, it's still fun to switch your style up every now and again. Rearranging furniture throughout the whole apartment was key to creating the feng shui and flow of the apartment.

Our master bedroom came with some great furniture pieces. We added our mattress to the top of the existing mattresses and our personal bedding, which gave the necessary pop of color to the room.  As an expat, it was important to me to bring back items from the United States that I knew would be difficult to find in China. Finding accent pieces from stores like Anthropologie, Home Goods, and World Market helped elevate and personalize the look of our apartment. Stripping the apartment of all the window treatments and replacing them with our own neutral white curtains was the icing on the cake to pull the whole look of the place together.

We brought a desk with us from our previous apartment. The extra furniture required some creative rearranging of furniture to create an office space.  We repositioned the living room couches that came with the apartment in the middle of the room. We anchored the television to one end of the room and the office to the other side of the space. In the dining room we pulled the three separate hutch cabinets that were spread throughout the apartment back together and used it to display our dishes in. We used our personal dining room table and chairs and stored the glass table that came with the apartment.