Apartment Refurbishing

I don't know that I would say our apartment needs to be "refurbished" as such--we did a lot of that last year--but Jackie and I are definitely developing certain "obsessions," you might say, that we want to continue to develop, hopefully over the summer I would think so we can be set for fall.

Right now, our obsessions look something like this:
1) Birdcages (Jackie)
2) Hourglasses (Me)
3) Hanging plants (both of us; it was my idea but has yet to be put into action; but this may happen via--
4) Hanging plants in birdcages
5) Hanging objects in general, especially more lanterns, though I think right now we're focused on the plants.
6) Rugs. I was talking to Marie who remarked that it made sense to have a kind of bohemian style household considering we're all grad students. She said something about "piles of rugs." I'm very amenable to this idea, though it does require figuring out where one gets said "piles of rugs." Rugs on sale at Anthropologie are really nice but at that price can only take you so far, and rugs at Ikea could maybe be filler but I'm not covering even our hideous carpet with Ikea rugs. Carpet surplus stores of some sort, perhaps?
7) Books. I'm not sure that this counts, but it's kind of hard to deny that a large part of our decor is books. And we keep buying them.

So, I did buy some hourglasses at Anthropologie. The ones I bought at the store aren't online, and the ones in the pictures online aren't all for sale, but aren't they pretty?







And then there are the birdcages. We already have four, mostly the black wrought-iron sort not really meant for birds (can wrought-iron be that thin?). Jackie and I were searching on etsy though and found a few good ones. I can't remember all the ones she found, but this one is really nice.

























And then this is so hilarious I really kind of want it because I think it would add to the generally bizarre and unexpected atmosphere of our apartment (it is a "birdcage" made out of a drawer, plus wire, an old key, and something vaguely French which according to the seller makes it a "French birdcage"; I assume the French do not actually keep their birds in wire-domed drawers):






















Finally, I really want this bench for downstairs from Urban Outfitters, but I've been told by various people that there's nowhere to put it. Jackie finally said I could get it if we put away the TV. Since I'm all for setting up a computer projector system instead of the TV (we definitely need to find out how much *that* would cost, however), a bench seems like a good exchange to me:



(I do need to work a little bit with an image program to cut out white space on images if I need to--actually, I really just wish I had photoshop again since it's been years, but I imagine my laptop isn't up to its latest incarnation).