LIVE, LAUGH, LOFT
Creating a sense of home with scrappy, eclectic style on a barely-there budget.
Throughout college and my early 20s, I lived all over the city like a typical broke New Yorker, bouncing from one tiny apartment to the next, from Washington Heights to East New York. Some of the highlights include:
Classic Murphy bed apartment with the landlord special treatment and clanging unadjustable heat pipe (this one I remember fondly)
A semester in the dorms at the New Yorker Hotel (yeah, that’s a thing), the 6 x 8 ft shared room with mysterious yellow goo dripping from the ceiling was much less glam than Eloise led me to believe, but I had a good roommate that found humor in the situation with me.
Sublet a literal closet in between apartments one summer. It was in a brownstone that was cut up into an absurd number of apartments but was near Central Park so I guess it was all about location. The sublet included another three separate little rooms for the closet, the toilet/sink, and the shower, each with its own additional key to keep track of. The bed was four couch cushions taped together. Luckily for me, this was during the summer that Pokémon GO came out so I spent most of the time in the park chasing Charizards.
The roachiest apartment ever, no matter how clean we kept it. Also next to a funeral home!
Another shockingly small apartment, shared with a roommate so you could always hear the other breathing from the next room and drive each other crazy by simply existing.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, what I thought would be a 2 week visit with family eventually turned into me moving back in with my parents for a year. When it was time to move back to the city, I was determined to get a place to myself no matter what. After much internet lurking I found my loft, filthy and in major disrepair, but I knew it had potential.
Fixing this place up has been one of the most exhausting but rewarding projects I’ve ever taken on and it’s made me realize my passion for furniture restoration and interior design. This place is perfectly imperfect and it’s my sanctuary.
