GRAND UNVEILING...The Apartment.

At long last, here are the before and after pictures of the apartment. Sadly, the before pictures don't show you how incredibly disgusting the apartment was. French moving out/in standards are definitely not the same. I don't think anyone has ever cleaned the windows or door frames in this apartment since the building was built 50 years ago. And that was just the start of the icky-ness. I have never taken more than a weekend to move into a new place in the states. This took me and three other people (Richard's family drove the 45 min up here pretty much every day) two weeks just to get it clean enough to start WORKING on the apartment. Then a week after changing out old fixtures, etc etc we moved the furniture in...

This is what those little "cupboards" under the sink really are. Doors that open up to the floor. 

Richard's Dad installed actual cupboards for us.

He also got rid of the old crusted tiles, put in a new counter-top, and built a little table!

And we are already stocked up! 

The toilet---they couldn't even be bothered to just paint over this crap.

Then when we asked them to buy a new toilet seat they went with the cheapest option and broke it from screwing it on too tight.

Yay I built this little furniture thing!!! 

Hallway :-)

The bathroom was 100x more disgusting than this picture really shows.

Guest Bedroom (no air conditioning)

Our bedroom

Yay...there were already closets in both rooms...

but they looked like this....so Richard's mom and I spent two days repainting the closets and lining them with adhesive paper...

lol this is when i was building that thing for over the toilet.

I built the desk and bookshelf! woohoo

yay clean closets!

This is our rental agent, M. Bernard. He is a very animated character...he replaced the air conditioning in the living/dining room area. 

Our tiny picnic table for the in-between stage...the dining room table was just being delivered and still had to be stained/treated.

So last but not least was our battle with these stupid pigeons who live in the hole next to our balcony. During the day, they hang out at our place and crap EVERYWHERE. Then around 6pm they go back into their stupid nest and watch us. For weeks we contemplated the best way to kill them. Richard immidately wanted a gun, but since they are illegal in France, we started thinking more along the lines of poison, chemical sprays and beheading. 

In the end, we went with giant cacti and pointy bamboo. It works! Now they stay on their side. I guess it's ok because they're kind of a cute couple, they snuggle and hang out all day.

Our Street---Tourist land. All the best night clubs and souvenir shops. We get teased for living here but I love it...it's the closest thing to living in the US---things are open past 6pm and everyone leaves me alone when I walk by myself in my weird foreigner clothes! 

This is our building, we live in the second balcony up from the Nespresso on the left there.

So in the end, the apartment had almost ALL of our "Required Qualities." It is a 5 min walk to the ocean, in walking distance from practically everything, it has two bedrooms, a parking space, and now after one month of work, it's awesome. The rent is on the cheap end, at 800 euro, but Richard probably spent a couple thousand redoing/painting/buying new furniture for it. It was worth it though, because we are kind of in love with our little space. 

So now, everyone come visit us!!