The bedroom and bathroom are arranged to your tastes now in your brand new apartment. Your mother commented favorably about the removable wall decalswhen she dropped by on Wednesday, and your best friend loves your new table lamp.

You’re a little bit shocked that you could go on for days like this, eating out and coming home to crash luxuriously in your cozy bedroom suite.

But this is getting out of hand. You’ve just got to stop wasting all that money in restaurants, and you’ve been hankering for some nice home cooked macaroni and cheese. It’s time to make the kitchen useable.

The next Saturday morning, boxes of books and stacks of pillows and bric-a-brac get shoved from the kitchen onto the living room floor. A thorough cleansing follows, taking much longer than you planned, of course, because your standards are significantly higher than the previous tenants’.  You scrub and swipe to your heart’s content and then sit in the breakfast nook with a tall glass of milk and a watercress sandwich (yes, you popped over to the farmer’s market earlier this morning) surveying your culinary domain.

Energized by lunch, you get to work lining the drawers and cabinets with vinyl stickers so they’ll be pretty and easy to clean. Then it’s a breeze unpacking the several crates of kitchen ware. There’s a nice deep drawer for pots and pans; and you love the look of your crockery behind the glass cabinet doors.

You pause for a minute and watch the afternoon sun spill over the breakfast nook table onto the kitchen floor, and then you look to the sink, which is against the opposite wall, with no light. Not happy with this feature, you finish unpacking, and make a grocery list while the problem simmers in the back of your mind.

The apartment’s front door is adjacent to the kitchen, and there’s a bit of wall space beside it where you apply a chalkboard sticker for quick notes to yourself. Can’t miss important reminders if they’re right beside the door when you go out!

Easy solutions to a small space

Your new apartment is still in a state of chaos, except for the charming perfection of the bedroom, which you got all arranged yesterday. Last night, you threaded through the boxes in the living room to find a bottle of juice in the fridge, and enjoyed the refreshing snack back in your room. Later, getting ready for bed, you were dismayed to realize you can’t find your toothbrush, buried as it is somewhere deep in the pile of totes in the kitchen.

So this morning, priorities are clear: time to get the bathroom in order. Again, it’s not a large space: in all honesty, it’s tiny, but that doesn’t worry you.

After applying a good scrub to everything in the space, you manage to locate theshower curtain you grabbed on sale at Target. Clipping it up to the curtain rod, you appreciate your excellent foresight in choosing a small-print pattern that helps to keep the space open. A loud, large print would have made the room seem smaller.

Fitting all your toiletries in the space has you stumped for a while. There’s very little in the way of horizontal surface for holding things. You fill the medicine cabinet, the windowsill, the top of the toilet seat. It’s starting to look pretty untidy.

You don’t want to go back to the superstore, but this is starting to look serious. You take a deep breath, and clear everything out of the bathroom and onto your bed.

Then you look at the little room again. You can see four screws on the wall next to the sink, painted over in the usual beige, which previous tenants must have used to hold up shelves. But you don’t happen to have shelves handy, and you only have til 2pm to get this done.

Since no bright ideas to solve the dilemma seem to be forthcoming, you wander into the living room and pick up your delivery from WallCandy® Arts. You ordered a set of removable and reusable wall stickers, Stripes, and you calm your puzzled mind by carefully putting them up on the bathroom walls. When you’re done, the line follows an artful slant, and once again, helps enlarge the space.

Your glance falls on the sink, and you wonder where you’ll stash your toothbrush, and all of a sudden – ah ha! You march to the kitchen and retrieve all the tote bags sitting in a large pile in the corner. Dumping them on the bedroom floor, you empty out four mesh bags, and hold your breath as you hang them on the pre-existing bathroom wall screws. As it happens, they’re suspended just below the stripes you have put up, and they work perfectly to hold (and hide!) all your bathroom necessities.

Oh, and what about your toothbrush? For some reason, this problem takes longer to solve. You don’t want to use a plastic cup from the kitchen, and you don’t want to waste your allotted holes in the wall on a hanging toothbrush holder.

It’s not until your birthday (the next day!), when your co-worker gives you a really beautiful and useless little candy dish, that the moment of truth arrives. Setting the gift carefully on the bathroom sink, with the tube of paste and brush easily resting atop, you’re once again in awe of the easy solutions that are there if you just look for them!