Apartment Tour

Our apartment looks like this:

When we moved in there were 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. We rearranged it to be 2 bedrooms and one office. Also everything that wasn’t nailed down was relocated to make more sense for us. Also you’ll note the bidets in the bathrooms – not second toilets.

This is what it looked like before. Yellow highlighted objects were ones that were moved.

When you first walk in there is a looonnggg hallway across the whole house. Every single room has doors (kitchen door, living room double doors, etc) that are usually shut. Since we’re used to more open concept houses in the US we keep all the doors open.

The entryway has a mirror, a place for keys, and a hat rack. Behind the pictures of the suns is the circuit breaker and other not-pretty things. So the suns are functional little blemish hiders.

Old habits die hard. We did take our shoes off everyday for 3 years in Korea. So we still take our shoes off. The whole house is hardwood and impossible to keep clean. So taking our shoes off helps (not really). In Korea there is a little step to contain the shoes and act as a mental trigger to take them off. We put a rug down to simulate this – no shoes cross the rug. It is known.

The first room you come to in the long long hallway is the kitchen. 

It’s very dark wood. The dishwasher, freezer and fridge are all covered in wood pattern to match the cabinets. We added some teal rugs and trash can (not pictured) to brighten it up. All the dishes you can see are clean but not dry yet. They just stay out until they’re used again so we’re not going to put them away just to impress you. This is what it really looks like.

Behind where this picture was taken is the wall that fell apart (now successfully with tile on it again) and a large walk in pantry where Pantry Jesus watches over us all.

When we first moved in there was an entire table in the middle of the kitchen, the table is now in the pantry so it’s not walk-in anymore. It’s like a junk drawer except the entire pantry is the drawer. There were about 30 plates (bread plates, entree plates, saucers, etc) extra cups and probably 20 knives. We don’t need that much so there is an entire box of all the kitchen things we don’t need/have space for.

Next to the pantry is the laundry room. It’s half inside, half outside. This is where we can open the window and see all the neighbors houses. Our apartment building is a large square donut. The middle of the donut is where everyone hangs laundry (in the middle courtyard bit). When our neighbors above dry something large like sheets, it hangs down into our view. It’s all very cozy. Our biggest fear is dropping a sock/item from the clothesline down onto the bottom floor neighbors.

The white thing on the wall with all the pipes coming off of it is our hot water heater. The bombona lives under the sink. Since people don’t know what it looks like:

A bright orange bomb full of gas.

Here is the courtyard. The neighbors across from us clearly use their drying room as a storage area.

Exiting the kitchen/pantry/lanudry room and back into the hallway. On the opposite side of the hall is the living/dining room.

There are 2 huge entertainment centers/shelves. We populated them with random trinkets since we own exactly 2 books. Still they seem a little empty, er, minimalist.

The TV came with the apartment and we get 5 channels for free (a movie channel, Discovery, Disney, Cartoon Network and a soccer channel). Everyone gets these for free regardless of if you have cable or dish or whatever. So we actually watch a lot of movies in Spanish (you can change it to English but we don’t).

Behind the couch is the dining room area. We thought it made way more sense to have it back there instead of next to the windows like it used to be.

It’s a full 6 seater. The table looks thin but we can pull out a hidden bit and make it twice (thrice?) as big. It’s hard to tell. We also got really lucky and have good art on the walls. There are old maps of Andalucia and pictures of Martos from the 50s.

Behind the table is one of two ways to get to the balcony.

We keep a singular sad chair on the balcony because someone left it outside and the chair will never be clean again. When we take wine or tapas onto the balcony the sad chair serves as a table.

You can just see the road just below. It’s busy almost all day (it’s the main street through the whole town). So it’s loud all the time. Because there is farmland (olives) and farmers nearby we also have tractors, dirt bikes (loud!), 4 wheelers and actual horses that go up and down this road. We’ve also had religious processions going all around this road. Everyone was dressed in white and carried a huge thing up to the church.

Speaking of the church we have a great view of it from the balcony.

The huge wall is the backside of another apartment. Behind the huge white wall we can see La Piña, which has a castle on it, and the church, which is built on top of another castle. So yes, we can see two castles from our balcony.

The balcony can also be accessed through the office which is the next room on the tour down the loong hallway.

There is a built-in desk, and we moved another desk in. So we both have desks and chairs. Of course one chair is a lounge from the living room. 

We have minimalist decorations, postcards from our honeymoon and my jewelry.

The room next door is the guest bedroom.

There are 2 twin beds pushed in there together. There are no sheets or pillows (the covers on them are just covers to make the house look better for real estate). If anyone comes to visit we’ll get some real sheets. We use this room as a dressing room and a place for our backpacks.

Across the hall is the main bathroom. This has a bidet, toilet, vanity and bathtub. Something Spain does  is put the showerhead in the middle of the bath rather than on one side or the other. So showering together is easy as you can just push the water to the other side (instead of having to switch sides and walk around in the tub).

Finally we turn in an L from the long hallway into the master bedroom. We still don’t have a comforter even though the weather is changing dramatically now. We’ve hung up some art from Japan to cover up huge holes in the wall.

The other side of the bedroom is a wardrobe bigger than a truck.

It has tons of windows and could hold a person in each of it’s 6 doors. Behind that is the floating laundry basket. There is a huge mount for a TV (and old style TV not a flat screen). So laundry goes there, obviously.

Off of the main bedroom is a half bath. It has the shower from hell (doesn’t drain, sprays out of the shower and leaks everywhere). Also there isn’t a toilet paper holder so we have to just put the TP on a shelf next to the toilet.