Tips for Spring Decorating

Bring in Fresh Flowers

During the spring months, everything is starting to bloom. There is no better way to make your home feel spring-like than to bring fresh flowers into your space. Fresh flowers add color, texture, and scent to your home. You can place them in a vase or display a more elaborate arrangement for gatherings and social functions. 

Utilize Lightweight Fabrics and Pastel Colors

The second tip for decorating your home for spring is to utilize lightweight fabrics and pastel colors. Upgrade your curtains, table cloths, throw pillows, throw blankets and throw rugs with ones that are suited for spring. Put away your heavy fabrics and replace them with lighter fabrics, such as cotton, chiffon, linen or jute. Selecting pastel colors or colors with a spring-like pattern further enhance the feeling of spring in your place. 

Strategically Hang Mirrors

The final tip for decorating your home for spring is to strategically hang mirrors across from windows or other sources of natural light. During the spring months, it starts to stay lighter longer and you may want to soak in the sunlight after the darker winter months. Strategically placed mirrors reflect the natural light streaming into your home, making your space feel brighter, lighter and airier. 

Decorating can enhance the look and feel of an apartment. If you are looking for a new apartment in the greater Flagstaff, AZ area that has a spacious floor plan, great views and feels open and airy, Country Club Vista Apartment Homes may be ideal for you. Visit us today to see a model or inquire about pricing and availability. 

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Tips for Hosting a Game Night

Fun-Friendly Foods

Finger foods are the perfect choice for a game night event. They allow people to graze as the night progresses and as their hunger requires. You can set up a buffet-style area in your kitchen to allow guests to serve themselves. You might even consider ordering a couple of pizzas (depending on the number of guests you’re hosting) to feed your horde of hungry gamers and supplement your selection of finger foods.

Clean and Clear Surface for Game Boards and Pieces

One of the biggest complaints about game night fun is having to wait to set things up until a space has been cleared for gaming. Make sure your playing surface is ready to go when your guests arrive. If you know which game you’re planning to play, go ahead and have the board set up and pieces in place to save time and get the fun started.

Sufficient Seating for All Your Guests

Try to get a head count ahead of time for the total number of people attending and any “plus ones” they may be bringing along. This not only helps you determine how much food to prepare but also how much seating you’ll need to accommodate all your guests.

Make Rules Known

If your gathering is coming together for a specific game, consider printing little reminders about the rules or “procedures” of the game to help the players understand the rules and explain the game play mechanics.

Contact us today to learn about apartments in Flagstaff, and make sure you find an apartment that nicely accommodates your game night plans.

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How to Organize a Kitchen Pantry

1. Invest in a Label Maker

Keep a label maker in your kitchen for a more organized pantry. Whenever you store things in empty jars and bottles, make a label that will enable you to quickly identify the ingredients. Yes, you could handwrite labels, but the label maker ensures the writing is always easy to read.

2. Organize According to Size

Taller items should always be stored at the back of your kitchen pantry. Shorter items can go in front. This allows you to have several rows of items while still be able to see everything you have in your pantry.

3. Keep Canned Goods Together

Canned goods store very well on top of each other. For this reason, keep all your canned items together on one shelf. However, you should organize the canned goods according to use and ingredients. For instance, condensed milk should be with the canned pureed pumpkin, not with the canned soup.

4. Hang an Erasable Board

Hang a chalkboard or whiteboard next to your kitchen pantry to keep track of items you’re running low on. This way you’ll never be out of an essential ingredient for a recipe you want to make. 

5. Store Less-Used Items 

Less-used items like turkey roasting pans or stock pots either up high or down low. This will keep all the eye-level shelves available for the items you use most often. 

6. Install a Push Button Light

Inexpensive push button lights at each shelf will help you to see items inside your kitchen pantry. These lights can easily adhere to pantry walls or below the shelf above. 

These five kitchen pantry storage ideas will help make your Flagstaff, AZ apartments even more of a joy to cook in. To see the kitchen pantries in person, please contact us today.

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Festive Party

Deck out your apartment home with candles, leaves, and sparkle, and serve up your favorite festive flavors, such as apple pie, pumpkin cake, or eggnog. If you have kids on the guest list, include games and arts and crafts to keep them entertained as well!

Cookie Decorating Party

This is similar to an ice cream party and just as sweet. Provide your favorite toppings or have your guests bring some to share. Set up a cookie decorating "bar" (along the lines of a nacho bar) to let people try out different topping combinations throughout the event. Add to the fun with a cookie walk, where guests can win gourmet versions of this delicious treat along the way.

Football Get-Together

With football season in full swing, now is the time to invite your friends over to root for your favorite team. Serve up some football party fare, and include these college football cupcakes on your game-day menu. It's the perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon this season!

Game Night

Invite people you would like to get to know better, or friends and acquaintances who don't know each other well. You'll make some new friends in the process, and your guests will too. Encourage people to break the ice with these group games, or stick with classic games such as charades and Monopoly.

Our apartment homes provide lots of space for hosting gatherings.  Contact our apartments in Flagstaff, AZ to learn more about available floor plans and amenities.

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Flagstaff apartments

4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Apartment Life

1. Use the Swimming Pool

It’s a wonderful treat to be able to go for a swim any time you want to. In Flagstaff, the temperatures are warm enough to enjoy the swimming most of the year. The pool is a gathering place where everyone will go to relax or spend time with friends. The swimming pool offers not only a way to cool off, but also to meet your apartment home neighbors.

2. Utilize the Fitness Center

Having an on-site fitness center in your Flagstaff apartments complex is a huge benefit. For one thing, you’ll be able to get your workout in even when the weather is inclement. For another, you’ll be able to save a bundle because you won’t have to purchase a gym membership at some facility far away. Double win!

3. Engage in Resident Events

The management at your apartments in Flagstaff go out of their way to organize resident events. These events provide an easy way to meet neighbors who you might not see otherwise. Making social connections adds to the enjoyment of life overall, and it’s even better when you know your new friends live close by!

4. Visit the Playground

If you have youngsters, the playground facilities offer the chance to get kids outside in the fresh air and sunshine. You’ll be able to give your kids the opportunity to enhance their social skills while meeting fellow parents yourself. You never know if you might meet someone with whom you can share babysitting favors!

When you live in Flagstaff apartments, there are so many tremendous amenities to avail yourself of. Why not contact us today to find out all the benefits you can get from living here? We look forward to meeting you!

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Easy Breakfasts for Your Flagstaff Apartment Entertaining

• Strata. A strata looks complex but is actually very easy. Place four slices of your favorite bread in a square casserole dish. Beat four eggs with 1/2 cup milk and add salt, pepper and seasoning to taste. Pour this over the bread. Sprinkle with diced Canadian bacon and refrigerate overnight. Bake uncovered in a 350-degree oven for 30 minutes. Top with cheese and cook for 5 to 10 more minutes until strata is firm and golden. You have a delicious, simple breakfast casserole that feeds several with very little effort!

• Bacon for a Crowd. You can easily make bacon for a crowd in your oven. Place slices of uncooked bacon in your cold oven on a cookie sheet. Turn the temperature to 450 and keep an eye on things. In around 10 to 12 minutes, your bacon should be crisp and ready to go. Drain and you’ve got bacon for a crowd.

• Bagel Bar. Serve bagels with a variety of toppings including butter, cream cheese, cheese, fried eggs, Canadian bacon and peanut butter. Everyone can create the breakfast that suits their needs, and you can relax and enjoy good company.

Having a nice big kitchen and dining area can make serving these morning meals even easier. Check out our currently available apartments in Flagstaff at Country Club Vista Apartments and schedule a walkthrough today. We’d love to show you our currently available floor plans and see if one works for you.

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Looking to bring a little spring into your apartment this season? If so, consider these tips and tricks for decorating and styling your Flagstaff, AZ apartment.

Add Flowers, Of Course!

Nothing says spring quite like freshly bloomed flowers. Consider purchasing a few springy hued flowers at your local farmer’s market, or even buy some at the grocery store! These are always a great addition to any home.

Add Some Spring Scents Into the Mix

If you are used to having candles and home scents in your apartment, consider some specifically springy smells. Fresh flowers, herbs, and other spring smells are always available at home goods stores.

Try Plants

If you don’t like the thought of flowers dying on you, there are numerous different types of plants to choose from, too! You might also consider herbs so that you can use them in your kitchen as well.

Put Some New Pictures on Your Walls—or Art!

Springtime is the time for change, so why not change the things that you have on your walls? If you have pictures of your family on your walls or things you don’t want to alter, consider simply changing out the frames for new ones. You be surprised at how much this makes a difference in the look and feel if your home during spring.

Get Rid of Clutter

Finally, this isn’t a design element as much as it is an organizational tip. Consider getting rid of all of those cluttered items that you never use in your home. Donate them or give them to a friend so they’re still being used.

Spring Forward This Season by Renting a New Apartment!

Looking to explore the Flagstaff apartments currently available? Find a new place to call home and decorate in the exact style you prefer. Country Club Vista has numerous floor plans available, and our complex comes with a myriad of desirable amenities as well.

To see which floor plans we currently have available, contact us today!

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Dry winter skin gets hard to ignore as the coldest season of the year stretches on. Fortunately, there are some fun things you can do to tackle dry skin. Homemade scrubs are a great way to exfoliate and moisturize at the same time, and you can customize them with an almost endless variety of ingredients.

Here are four DIY scrubs that will leave your skin feeling great!

4 DIY Body Scrubs for Winter Skin

1. Avocado & Almond Scrub

1 avocado

1 cup ground oatmeal

1/3 cup ground almonds

Avocado can be just as amazing on your skin as it is in your favorite dishes. Its rich texture is lovely on your skin, moisturizing and smells great. Ground oatmeal and ground almonds provide the necessary abrasiveness to shed old skin.

2. Honey & Salt Scrub

½ cup honey

½ cup sea salt

Honey smells wonderful and moisturizes as you rub it in, while sea salt cleanses the roughness away and leave you with soft skin.

3. Coffee Scrub

¼ cup olive oil

1 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Peppermint oil

½ cup coffee grounds

This scrub is perfect for those mornings when you need a little lift. The rich aroma of the coffee stimulates your senses and the olive oil moisturizes.

4. Olive Oil Scrub

½ cup sea salt

¼ cup olive oil

½ cup brown sugar

Essential oil of your choice

This olive oil scrub covers all the bases of an enriching, moisturizing and exfoliating scrub. The brown sugar adds a nice textural difference and aroma, and you can customize the aroma even more with an essential oil of your choice.

Here for all Your Flagstaff Apartment Rental Needs

As your management team, we are dedicated to making your rental experience positive. Please check back with us for more great ideas, and contact us with any questions about our Flagstaff apartments!

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Bored of your typical coffee brew? You and other Country Club community residents can try the very best way to cold brew coffee at home. Iced coffee is a popular drink, but by brewing hot and cooling with ice, the coffee is naturally watered down. Enter the relatively recent phenomenon of cold brew coffee.

How Does Cold-Brewing Work?

Country Club Vista and other Flagstaff apartment residents need not be concerned that the cold brew method will require anything more than what most people have in a simple kitchen. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to make cold brew coffee:

1. Cold brew can be prepared in nearly any container. While specialty equipment does exist, you may use a French press, regular coffee pot, a jar, a plastic jug—even a bucket! As the coffee will never get hot, you don’t need tempered glass or steel.
2. Cold brew usually requires more grounds than usual. Most experts recommend you use twice the amount you would normally for the same size pot and that you use coarse ground coffee, if available. Put your coffee in your chosen container, add your usual amount of water, and just let it sit at room temperature or in the refrigerator.
3. Let the coffee brew for a minimum of 12 to a maximum of 24 hours. With practice, you’ll figure out how long to brew for your perfect cup.
4. Carefully strain your coffee. If you have a cold brew coffee maker or a French press this will be quite simple, but even without it’s a fairly easy process. You can use a fine-mesh strainer lined with a coffee filter, paper towel, or cheesecloth.

Serve and enjoy!

If you need a new apartment home to relax and enjoy your cold brew, feel free to stop by our office at Country Club Vista Apartment Homes!

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We walk through the rooms of a storm soaked apartment in Houston, Texas, as Mary, a twenty-plus-year resident of Nob Hill Apartments, points out the items she hopes she can keep, but we can clearly see are lost. The safety masks covering our mouths and noses do nothing to block the rank smell of stagnant flood water and growing mold. The air in the apartment is warm and humid, the air outside buzzing with mosquitos preying on the exposed skin of anyone walking through the community working to salvage what they can from the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Even with the flood waters receded, we feel the sense of loss that weighs heavy as a storm cloud over the apartment community we’ve come to serve.

We try to prepare Mary for the worst—the disheartening fact that most of her worldly possessions must be declared casualties of the hurricane’s destructive force. But Mary’s determination outweighs our own, and pushes us in a new direction. Where we strive to prepare her for despair, she insists upon building us up with hope. And as we tell her we will help her as best we can, she leaves us with these words: “When I was a child, my teacher told me that the good deeds you do are added as stars to your crown in heaven. Your crowns are going to be full of all the stars in the heavens.”

***

Our group of volunteers left Arizona in the early hours of September 6 to make our way to Houston. Our team was made up of multifamily housing team members from Bella Investment Group in Flagstaff, AZ, who had committed to partner with Apartment Life, an organization that places CARES Teams within apartment communities to “look for ways to love their neighbors as themselves.” We have often seen the outpouring of love CARES Teams deliver to the residents of our Bella communities—now was our chance to take the CARES mission upon ourselves and make a difference in the lives of those impacted by Hurricane Harvey.

After spending Wednesday evening assembling and loading U-Haul trucks with Resident Recovery Kits, we headed into the community on Thursday to see where we could help. As we approached Nob Hill Apartments, a 1300+ unit apartment community situated on Brays Bayou in the Meyerland suburb, we saw streets lined with debris and abandoned furniture, clothing, toys, even cars—all casualties of the surging flood waters. Nob Hill is where we met Mary, along with dozens of other residents who were packing up what they could to leave the community many of them called home. We expected the despair in the faces of the people of the community to match the destruction we saw in the streets. But where we expected despair, we saw hope.

One of the first young men we spoke to assured us that he had not been hit “too bad” by Harvey’s destructive power. “For me, it wasn’t as bad as for other folks,” he told us as we walked through one section of Nob Hill. “Other people got it much worse.” I learned later that for him, “not too bad” meant he “only” lost his car and about half of the possessions in his apartment. He counted himself lucky, despite his losses, and assured us that now that he knew we were there, he would help us find people who needed more help than he did. And he was true to his word. He eagerly came to us with the names and addresses of neighbors who could “really use your help,” and seemed overjoyed to be what he considered a “small part” of our work. The misery we expected seemed to have receded with the flood waters, and in its place love, humanity, and hope had blossomed.

For the CARES team in Houston, the Relief Kits and resources they handed out seemed like only a “drop in the bucket” of the recovery that needed to be done in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. An office team member, who had been pulled from a different property to assist at Nob Hill, described her efforts of pointing residents toward resources and gathering contact information from those who needed to move as “a drop in the bucket” compared to what she felt the people around her needed and the losses she knew they had endured. Even as we gave resources, monies, and hugs to those we met, we began to say that we knew it was only “a drop in the bucket” for those who had lost so much so quickly.

Yet the enduring power of hope outshined our perspective. The more people we met, the more we got the sense that in creating for themselves a sense of normalcy even among lost possessions, abandoned homes, and more, the residents of this community were finding something beyond the despair we saw on the news. Make no mistake—there remains much to be done to restore what has been lost in these communities devastated by the storms. But even beyond the knowledge of loss is the hope of helping hands. We saw donations from across the country pooled together to fan the flames of this hope. We witnessed police cars lining the streets from around the country to lend aid and relief to first responders who had not yet even had the chance to assess and accept their personal losses. We saw barbecue fundraisers and Red Cross vans delivering lunches and dinners on a daily basis where they were needed most. We saw neighbor reaching out to neighbor to lighten each other’s loads. And we saw tears of sorrow become tears of joy as people heard how far folks had come to help.

“To help me?” one woman said to me, stepping back in shock from a tight hug when I told her we had flown in from Arizona. “Y’all came all this way just to help me?”

“We know it’s just a drop in the bucket,” I found myself saying, but she cut me off.

“A drop in the bucket?” she gasped, clasping my hands in her own. “Child, it’s the whole ocean!”

I left Houston with news of the impending impact of Hurricane Irma ringing in the background on every television set we passed from our hotel lobby to the airport terminal. In the shadows of yet another destructive storm, it’s hard to ignore that there remains so much need along the Gulf Coast as residents there work to rebuild. Hurricane Harvey’s impact will be felt in this area for months, if not years, to come.

But even in the shadows of these destructive storms crashing upon our shores and cities, we see the silver linings illuminated by the selfless acts of people who keep their heads held high, their spirits lifted, and the hopes of their communities blazing against the dark times ahead. We can all be a part of bringing hope to these communities. Apartment Life continues to raise funds for relief efforts for both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. The Red Cross continues to step up their efforts to prepare and provide relief. Countless other organizations are out there, waiting for each of us to step up and impact lives by being beacons of hope in the midst of despair.

Please join us in supporting the ongoing relief efforts, and make your own "drop in the bucket" contribution to those impacted by this year's hurricane storms:

Donations for Apartment Life Harvey Relief Kits: https://tiny.cc/alharvey

Donations for Apartment Life Irma Relief Kits: https://tiny.cc/alirma

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