A year and a half ago, leaving my little student studio apartment and moving in to what we now call our house, seemed liked the only rational thing to do. Moving me in, was a big challenge for me and my parents, because what we were needed to face is literally beyond imagination. A house owned by an artist such as my aunt, who would always spend her time researching among hundreds of paper sheets and files, or painting on the kitchen table or writing on top of piles of manuscripts cannot get easily sorted out.

*See what I mean?*

When my dad and I first got in the apartment in order to take a  look of what we were up against, I was petrified. Honestly, I thought it would take ages for us to clean out the tons of gallery invitations and newspaper subscriptions that had been lying on the floor, the chairs, the tables for years probably, and then get rid of the old furniture and actually start cleaning a house that hadn’t  been properly deep cleaned since 2001. Pretty scary, huh? Yeap, tell me about it…

Let me just tell you we got rid of about 40 large rubbish bags full of invitations, flyers, envelopes, magazines and all sorts of paper that had just being piled upon one an other throughout the years! (I hope the bags were recycled) Also, as I mentioned earlier, being an artist, my aunt owned many books. And by many, i really really mean a lot. Due to lack of space we had to figure out which books we wouldn’t be using and decided the best thing was to donate them(about 12 crates) to two libraries back in Kefalonia, for both of which my aunt had worked hard and fought through her whole life.
The cleaning up process took us about a month and after that my mum painted the whole place and that was definitely another two weeks. At the time, not much of a renovation could take place, so we just painted and fixed as many things possible, till the day I can afford a complete makeover. Words simply cannot describe the amount of energy both of my parents put in this place during those months for me to be able to live in as comfortably as possible, but until this day, i still don’t feel that my house is where I want it to be in terms of cleanliness, layout and aesthetics .

*Yes, that’s what my kitchen looked like the first day of the challenge*

What I’m trying to say is, that although things have radically changed around here since these photos were taken, after a year of living on my own here and now living with a man, I’ve noticed many things that need changing… So,I guess I will be having plenty of things to do around this apartment, to make it look and feel as a home for me and Mr. T…