SF Apartment Living – It Can Be Done! And Stylishly!

San Francisco gets a bad rap when it comes to housing.  Sky high rental prices second only to New York, teeny tiny living spaces, and for most, windowsills and balconies are the only “garden space” one can hope for.  Admittedly, I probably won’t be able to realize my dream of owning property here until I’m 89, but them’s the breaks.  As they say, location, location, location.  And, as my fiancee (it’s true- I’m getting hitched) reminds me, you get what you pay for (and, there’s rent control).

So, although I adore my neighborhood, I’m getting really tired of cramming all our stuff in this tiny little 1-bedroom.  Our hobbies are what kill us: 3 surfboards, 3 jampacked fabric bins, bags full of painting supplies and frames, 4 boxes of beer brewing bottles and a pretty impressive library later, we’re sardinian and fighting the cats for lounging space.

But, again – we’re getting married soon, and should be saving money for the wedding – so no moving for us. Especially since our rent was only raised by $1.65 this year (I can’t tell you how relieved I was).

So instead of haunting the craigslist apartment ads, I did the next best thing: redecorating.

Above is the finished product. I started with an old, empty frame without glass, so I ended up having to tack the print to the wall, and then hang the frame around it.

Then I decided to do something interesting with all the framed photos and drawings I had laying around and came up with this (apologies for the poor quality):

So, that was fun. My favorite, though, was figuring out how to store our bikes. There is no garage space and one of the bikes is prone to rust, so it had to be inside. So here’s what I came up with:

I used picture hooks to hang bamboo sticks halfway up the wall so that we wouldn’t have to scrub off the black tread marks that inevitable happen with bikes, and hemmed some curtains much shorter and gave them tabs for hanging. I’m really pleased with the result.

Now, to be fair, I did get the bike storage inspiration from a really old post from DesignSponge, which I’m sure is buried deep in the depths of the internet somewhere. Since I can’t find it to link back to it, I’ll just say D*S is my favorite blog, and you should check it out.