Our Studio Flat

And now, as requested by quite a few people (mostly our parents!) this is where we live.

I am going to try and do two things. Firstly, I want to give you an idea of how all these pictures fit together, so I will try to orientate you in each one. Secondly, I am going to point out some rather odd design features of our flat because Ben and I find them amusing! :-)


First, from our front door looking in. This photo is to orientate you.

On the left: our bed and in the background, our study area. Out of sight, towards you, is some cupboard space and our bathroom.

On the right: in the foreground is our kitchen, in the midground is our dinner table, and behind that is a nook for a TV.

In the middle is a coffee table which is annoying more than useful, and an uncomfortable two-seater settee that I think we have sat on for a total of 10 minutes between the two of us! When we eventually get a TV the settee might be used to watch it, but I think it more likely that we will just watch on the bed!


This is taken from the dining table looking backtowards the front door. The wood-coloured door on the left is our front door, and the one in the middle is our bathroom. The other doors are our cupboards. The bed is a double which we still find too small, but at least its reasonably comfortable. There is also storage space under it, which is where we have our suitcases/bags.

I was a bit worried about storage space, but there is actually a lot of empty space in all our cupboards at this point, mainly because there is only so much you can bring over in a suitcase each! Ask me how the storage is going at the end of our year here....


This is our bathroom, which is tiny and space-rocket-like! The water goes under the curtain when we have a shower and makes the rest of the bathroom floor wet.


This is near the study space looking towards where our TV will go when we can afford one. You can also see our window, which looks like it's the perfect design for a balcony, with a window that opens like a door and everything... but yet, no balcony! Oh well, the view is still great!


This is our kitchen area. Of the two fridge-like things under the bench, one is a fridge and one is a freezer... This amount of freezer space is great because we like making up large meals and then freezing it in portions, which requires a good sized freezer.

Some odd things about our kitchen:

- All cupboards swing out sideways, despite having horizontal handles in the centre of the bottom of each door.

- The same goes for the Oven!!! Ben and I have never come across an oven door that swings sideways before!

- There are NO drawers (not even for cutlery or cooking utensils! GRRR)

- The only space for preparing food is in between the microwave and the 'hob' (i.e. stove-top) - its about the size of the stove top! Teeny!

- The hot water and cold water come out of the same tap (which is a nice change, for England, usually there are two different taps)... But:
- the cold water tap's handle is on the left hand side! (In the bathroom its around the right way, but there are two taps again!)
- and when you have both hot and cold water on, they don't mix properly so instead of warm water, one side of the water stream feels hot, and the other side feels cold!!


And finally, Ben at our study area. This is nice. It has a crazy amount of power points though, four pairs!

Having read all that, you would definitely be forgiven for thinking we don't like the place. But that's not actually true, we do like it, because it's new, spacier than we thought it would be, reasonably priced, close to town, and very, very close to where I study (less than 5 minutes walk away!). And if Ben gets the Uni IT job he's applying for at the moment (fingers crossed!) - it will be ridiculously close to where he lives too.

:-)

- nic.