It's Getting Batty In Here.

Thanks to our friend, Jenny, for coming up with that creative title on Instagram! To add some holiday decor to our home, we hand cut a couple dozen bats out of black construction paper and added a big impact to our wall. We've found that a pack of construction paper can go a long way in adding decorations to any party. For our bats, we used two different sizes. We placed the larger size closer to the floor and the smaller bats further up on the wall as they are flying off!

We purchased some skulls from Target and spray painted them white to help them blend in with the other decor of our home. Placing them around white and pink pumpkins, add the perfect holiday spook to our home. We took mini orange pumpkins and painted with a couple coats of pink paint that we had in our supply closet.

Cute little inexpensive ways to add holiday decor to your home!

Where To Find Quirky Coffee Table Books.

We all love a good coffee table book, and finding the right books that suit your personal style can be difficult. There's your traditional book stores like Barnes & Noble and Books A Million, where you're guaranteed to find something generic and will definitely fill up that blank space on your coffee table. But we personally love books that speak to who we are as individuals. 

Many times finding the perfect book involves searching through bespoke, independently owned shops that don't specialize in books, yet carry unique titles. For example, our Wes Anderson book came from a little furniture shop on a side street in Sag Harbor. We picked it up 4th of July weekend one summer while we were meandering through the area, enjoying the holiday. We purchased a truly unique book featuring art made in North Korea from a pop up shop in Beijing. The images and the content of the book, Made In North Korea: Graphics From Everyday Life In The DPRK are special and not widely available to the public.  

However, it's understandable that a specialty shop in the Hamptons or China may not be accessible to you, and that's where Urban Outfitters comes in. We love picking up unique coffee table books there! This post is not sponsored by them, we just love everything we find when we walk into the store and browse through their home goods section. I've linked their books at the bottom of this post.

Rug - Overstock {here}  ::  Couch - World Market {here}  ::  Coffee Table - World Market {here}  ::  Wood Planter - Target {here}  ::  Lamp - Target {similar}  ::  Wes Anderson Book {here}  ::  Stephen Colbert Book {here}  ::  Made In North Korea: Graphics From Everyday Life In The DPRK {here}  ::  Urban Outfitters Coffee Table Books {here}  ::  Cacti Book - Urban Outfitters {here}  ::  Houseplants Book - Urban Outfitters {similar}  

Christmas Decorating 101.

I surprised myself and my immediate family members that know me so well, when a small part of me did not want to decorate for Christmas this year. We had just purchased our house 3 months earlier, and we were still working on the basic decor of the home, the thought of putting up a Christmas tree in every room exhausted me! But then our relatives that live far away decided this Christmas was the perfect time to come down from Canada to celebrate the season with us, so in true Julie Ann Events tradition, the Christmas trees went up the day after Halloween. We pulled out all of our trees and decorations that had been sitting in storage for the past four years and decked our halls.

In our formal living room, we went with a basic tree and trimmed it with neutral color palette, using primarily all white and silver decorations. The tree popped nicely off of our bright pink floor rug. After four years of not seeing our annual holiday decorations, it was fun to pull out what we have had and incorporate the Christmas decorations we purchased in Hong Kong and China. There was a fun mix of bespoke ornaments interspersed with Ikea ornaments!

How many Christmas trees is too many? I asked that question out on our Instagram feed. In our family room, I put up three trees around our television. I used colored ornaments that I had purchased on clearance from Target 4 years ago and never had an opportunity to use since we moved. Unconsciously I had also purchased a garland in a coordinating color scheme from a market in Hong Kong. It worked perfectly to tie all three trees together. White star tree toppers on each tree pulled the look together.

One room in our home held our family tree, which is hands down my favorite tree of the house. We wait till the day after (American) Thanksgiving to pick out a live tree and hang our family ornaments on it that hold sentimental meaning to us throughout the years. There's a heart ornament I made in the third grade, snowmen footprints that all three of our kids made that one year we had three kids living in our house, the yearly ornaments that we buy each of our kids which one day they will take with them to their own homes, and the ornaments from our first Christmas spent together. It's under this tree that the gifts we give out reside, and where we sit in front of on Christmas morning to open stockings and read Luke 2 as a family.

We managed to put up eight trees up this year, and next year we hope to add four more to that number. Christmas is the one holiday I go all out in decorating for, since it's such a significant holiday in the spiritual life of our personal family. We truly enjoy celebrating the birth of Jesus, and continuing the traditions we have established as a family. It's such a special time in the year to celebrate with those we love dearly.


Entertainment Dresser - Wayfair {Similar}  ::  Marte Lounge Chair - Urban Outfitters {here}  ::  Chamberlin Recycled Leather Sectional Sofa - Urban Outfitters {here}  ::   Hamilton Wood Media Console - Urban Outfitters {here}  ::  Natural Carved Zaria Headboard - World Market {here}  ::  Round Glass and Metal Ilene Coffee Table - World Market {here}  ::  Metal, Wood, and Leather Bar Cart - Target {here}

We Were On A Break.

Apparently we were on a bit of a break from blogging thanks to the firewalls that China has up in their country. Since this little ole blog is located on Google, writing on it just required the extra step of making sure the VPN was on and running. Call it what it really was... pure laziness to give this blog the attention it was needing. But here I am, sitting in my house in South Carolina, dusting off the cobwebs to this site and rekindling our relationship. 

So welcome back. I've missed you. Let's get to know each other again!

[photo by :: L.E. Photography Canada]

We Decorated For Christmas But We're Not Going To Be Here.

Yup, you read that correct. I put up a Christmas tree, hung our stockings, and played Sufjan Stevens' Christmas albums, all the while knowing that we weren't even going to be in the country for the actual holiday. Our family had planned a full three week vacation exploring the country of Vietnam during the advent season. But as a mother with two smallish children, we all needed to have some semblance of tradition, so up went the decorations. That Ikea Christmas tree has done wonders for us for the past four years. It comes with such easy set up and easy take down as well.

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.

Christmas In Beijing.

Out came our trusty Christmas tree that we had shipped over from Hong Kong along with our four Christmas stockings that I had purchased from the Flower Market in Prince Edward. Seeing the familiar ornaments and continuing family traditions keeps the excitement going from year to year for our two children that move from country to country.

We kept our decorations minimal and simple. I made a holiday banner out of white card stock, which I hung above our dining room hutch. The landscapers for our apartment complex trimmed the trees in front of our building, and I placed some of the branches in a vase and hung ornaments from them.

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!

We Are Moving To Beijing!

My husband's job is taking us to from Hong Kong to mainland China, Beijing. We are excited to experience this new adventure in a new city and to see where it takes us. We loved our two years in Hong Kong, and enjoyed planning parties for our family and friends here. Stay tuned to see what is in store for us for the next two years!!!

Holiday Tour Of Our Home.

The day after Thanksgiving we went out in search of Christmas decorations for our little flat. Once our tree was purchased {from Ikea} we had the dilemma of where to place it our home. After having my assistant move our furniture around several times, we finally settled on the best place for the tree.

My one handmade holiday contribution to our decorations this year was to make the "O Holy Night" sign and cover it in silver glitter.  I really miss not having my Silhouette Cameo here with me in Hong Kong. I've gotten spoiled with having a machine do my cutting for me, so I just managed to hand cut my one sign before I decided it was enough.

In past years, I've put up a tree in every room of our home. We've always waited till after Thanksgiving to put up the live tree. I didn't have the heart to purchase a large live tree this year, but when I was walking through the flower market in Mong Kok, I couldn't resist bringing home a little tree that now sits on our kitchen counter.

Welcome To Our Flat In Hong Kong - Our Bathroom.

 

The final room in our tiny flat is actually a room I find to be very beautiful. Floor to ceiling windows provide a beautiful view of the mountains that surround us. Fortunately we do have pull down shades to give us the necessary privacy! There is definitely a lot of glass in the bathroom and with little kids that equals a lot of smudges to wipe off. I love the glass and I smile at the smudges because it also means we're just living life. 

For the first time in our married life we also have a medicine cabinet above the sink. I've always turned my nose up at them, thinking that they just weren't very attractive, but I am now in love with the storage and convenience of what a medicine cabinet can do to expedite the whole getting ready process in the morning!

Since this is the final room in our house, thus concludes the tour. This has been the first time either my husband or I have lived in an apartment, and it's definitely a different experience from being a home owner. Primarily subtle differences and we're adapting very well. We love our new home and are thoroughly enjoying our new life here in Hong Kong.