style: pier 1 holiday

This post brought to you by Pier 1 Imports. All opinions are 100% mine.

When Chad and I first moved in together, we both had about a month before our jobs started, and we'd just sunk every available dollar into our apartment (sadly, in Manhattan, it's possible to be house-poor even if you're a renter)!  I'd thrown a little bit of a fit over some of his bachelor furniture, and he'd done the same with my super-girly pink-green-floral pieces.  So we were in the interesting situation of furnishing an apartment from almost scratch, on a very limited budget.

Enter Pier 1.  You cannot imagine how many trips we made to the Pier 1 on Fourteenth Street -- I'm pretty sure by the end of the month, we'd hauled half the store into taxis and up three flights of stairs to our door.  But at the end of it all, we had a really lovely, mostly decorated apartment.  I've spent the past two years putting the finishing touches on our little space, but the bulk of it was really done in those first 30 days.

So when Pier 1 approached me about writing a post, I was totally down -- if you have friends or family who are settling into a new home, or putting the finishing touches on an old one, it really is the go-to place.  And I took this excuse to do something I've been meaning to do for a while -- a makeover of the hallway of our apartment. 

At the store, I got this beautiful console table that matches the rest of the dark wood in our apartment, and also this cute gift box, which I filled with some of our antique ornaments.  My mom is hugely into Christmas decorating, so she's passed on a number of gorgeous pieces to me over the years -- perfect to mix and match with store-bought ones until you've developed a collection of your own!

Last but not least, I painted the room!  I loved the idea of a red hallway, but the paint came out uneven and splotchy the first time I applied it, and since the lighting isn't great in that part of our apartment, it always seemed a little grungy.  So I tried about a half dozen paint samples before settling on this bright yellow, and I'm so happy with how it looks now.  Paint always looks really bright when you first apply it, but I got used to this color within a day or two, and now I love our bright, picture-perfect entryway!

Check out more photos of my room makeover and other holiday gifts from Pier 1 below!  And one last thing -- if you become a fan of Pier 1 on Facebook, they'll donate $1 to Toys for Tots!  What better way to spread some holiday cheer?