Continuing our little apartment makeover series, today’s post is about out Living Room! To see the previous Sports Room one, click here. I’m also including our bathrooms since this is a fairly short post.

To be fair, the “Before” picture isn’t really accurate. Our living room didn’t look like that all the time before … this was in the midst of our craziness preparing for the party and getting the apartment ready. The major changes to the living room were the lamps, the framed photograph, a side table, a new coffee table, and well… cleaning up. We had our sofas from last year and the TV and swiveling TV mount about 6 months ago.

Nevertheless, here is our “After” photo. Much cleaner, better lighting and some small design additions. Leather sectional and Brown Microfiber ‘Nest’ chair from Urban Barn, Vancouver. Floor lamp and table lamps are both Robert Abbey Fine Lighting “Porter” polished nickel lamps, from Chintz & Co.

Noguchi coffee table from the Modern Source. Samsung TV and Sony surround sound, I believe both were purchased at Future Shop. Photograph is my own (see below) and cheap frame is from IKEA

Framed photo.

Our lounging area! I really love the Nest chair… Allan and I use it for watching TV, playing video games and cuddling… it really fits two people perfectly who want to cuddle and watch TV at the same time… it’s kind of a hybrid between a bed and a couch.

Aluminum Side Bistro Table from Urban Barn. Here’s the Porter table lamp. Silk flowers from Thomas Hobbs, with two of my favourite cookbooks … Gordon Ramsay 3 Star and Araxi’s cookbook.

Our fish tank! Finally cleaned up a bit and the plants are really starting to grow with the new light and CO2 reactor I spoke about in a previous post. In fact, if you check that post and look at the tank now… you can really see how much plant growth there is! We’re really trying to aquascape it to look like a real landscape… almost like something out of the Lion King. Stay tuned, I’m hoping the tank gets better and better. In other news, since the aquarium is open on the top, I’m really happy no one spilled a drink into it at the party!

Here’s my computer setup… dual Samsungs and the Logitech diNovo keyboard set and MX Revolution mouse. I’ve had these for ages and seem to just keep replacing them I like them so much.

I thought I’d include the bathrooms too since this is a bit of a short post. Here’s our Master Bathroom. Brown towels and bathmats from The Bay (Distinctly Home) and photo frames from Walmart. Photos in the frames are below.

Framed photos.

Here’s the guest bathroom. Towels and bathmat from The Bay (Distinctly Home) and photo frame from Walmart. Photo in the frame is below.

Framed photo.

And that’s it! What do you think of our living room makeover?

I love relaxing weekends in Vancouver. Sometimes the best weekends are spent at home.

My favourite moment was Allan and I spontaneously dancing in the middle of our living room together for absolutely no reason. Other good moments include playing 9 holes of golf at Westwood Plateau (Academy course) with Trev and Tom, doing yoga every night together before bed, and of course… visiting the fish store.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Allan and I are slowly putting the work into building our fish tank into an aquascape. The first step is of course to get the right lightning (check), CO2 going (check), and the right water conditions for the plants and the fish (in progress). After that, it’s a matter of designing what you want your ’scape to look like, picking out the right fish and plants, and making sure you can keep everything alive! Definitely not easy at all.

It’s worth it though. It’s like a moving piece of art.

So we stopped by our favourite fish store, Big Al’s, to pick up a couple new plants and some new fish.

Here’s a shot of our work-in-progress tank. As you can see, pretty bare on plants and way too much algae.

We bought a Red Dragon Discus… I’ve always wanted Discus fish in our tank, but they are tricky to keep happy and need specific conditions. I think we’ve finally got the right set up, and the Discus so far seems to be fitting into the community. It’s a gorgeous fish, somewhat expensive, but very much worth it. The red pattern really stands out in the tank. Over time, as the Discus matures, it will start to develop iridescent blue in its fins to complement the red colouring. Very excited! Nickname: Disco Stu.

We also got 2 new bunches of Rangeri Sword plants. We’d like to eventually fill the back wall with them. Some more plants will hopefully keep the algae levels down a bit more.

We also picked up 2 Golden Rams… really beautiful fish, but difficult to keep alive. We’re hoping they will grow big in the tank because that gorgeous yellow colour would be a nice addition.

We’ve been having a serious algae problem ever since we added the new light (as you can see in some of the photos), so we purchased 4 Siamese algae eaters. We were pretty skeptical that they would make any difference at all… and had been warned that they would do well with our red-tipped shark… but so far they seem to be faring well. And miraculously… they are actually eating the algae!

Here they are in action chowing down on our algae.. we couldn’t believe it!

A side profile of some of the new fish in the tank… very excited!

Although we are still quite a ways from the aquascape we want, we are making good progress and are really loving the new fish already!

I have a secret interest. It’s in aquascapes.

Aquascapes are beautiful aquariums that are artistically arranged with plants, rocks, and driftwood to create an interesting display. Often, they can look like landscapes out of the real world.

I had an aquarium all throughout growing up, and fortunately Allan is very much into aquariums and I am lucky enough to be able to enjoy his stunning fish tank all day long! If you haven’t seen the timelapse of our fish tank yet, I highly recommend you check it out here on Vimeo:

Moving and Fish Tank Timelapse Photography – VancityAllie.com from VancityAllie on Vimeo.

I wanted to share with you some of my favourite aquascapes in the world.

One of the most famous masters of aquascapes is Takashi Amano from Japan. (All below photos credit to http://www.adana.co.kr)

As you can see, it takes a lot of time, effort and design strategy to build an amazing aquascape.

Another one of my favourite aquarium designers is the Aquarium Design Group. All below photos credit to ADG.

The first three photos are freshwater tanks, and the last one here is a “paludarium” which is a combination of a fish tank with some “on-surface” vegetation and sometimes creatures. If you look carefully you can see the chameleon.

Personally, I would LOVE to have a proper paludarium is our apartment, but it’s really difficult to do and expensive. And Allan loves the fish tanks so I don’t think it is going to happen

So we talked about it and I think we’re going to continue with the freshwater aquarium and start turning it into a proper aquascape. We used to have plants growing to the top of the plant, but some bad choices in fish led to all the plants being eaten. We’re now rid of those fish, but it’s a long slow road back to cultivating the plants again.

Allan bought himself a brand new light that will help with the plant growth. For those who know this stuff, it’s a Coralife Aqualight Strip Light 4 x 65 Watt. TONS of light! We’re planning on eventually scaping it like an Amano tank with the rocks and carpet of Riccia (the stuff that looks like grass). Very excited! 

Allan built a DIY CO2 reactor out of a plastic bottle and some tubing to encourage more plant growth. Pretty cool for only $5 worth of equipment. It bubbles out all day long, just with a little mixture of yeast, baking soda and water. Lasts for weeks.

Stay tuned! We’ll be sure to post some photos of our new aquarium aquascape when it starts looking cool!

So I finally got a chance to put together the time lapse photography movies I’ve been talking about for a while now.

12 hours and about 2,000 photos crammed into just 2 minutes. Pretty nifty! I think it turned out alright for my first go at true timelapse. I have some ideas on what I want to do next… I think the execution will be better next time.

This time lapse photography was done for our move in February 2009 from our old apartment into the new one. Also features the rather epic set up of the fish tank in our living room. Takes quite a lot of work to put the fishies back in their watery home! Check it out below:

Setup: Nikon D90 on a tripod, hooked up to laptop using Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2 software, time lapse photos/frames compiled using Quicktime Pro and Adobe Premiere CS4. Note to self next time… turn off auto exposure.

Bonus points to anyone who knows which soundtrack this song is from

Enjoy!