A Cozy Fall Apartment in New York City - a full tour

Come on in, welcome to our apartment. It's been a while since I've shown you around and shown you some of the updates we've made. So I'm excited to do this. It's very, it was a rainy morning, so it's a very cozy day at home and I'm going to take you around. We can start here in the dining room. If you have never watched any of my videos before, we live in New York City. So this is an apartment, it's two beds, two baths in the Upper West Side. It's been our home for the last three years and we have loved the location. We've loved the space. It has a washer and dryer in unit, which is very nice. If you've lived in New York City, you know that washer and dryer and a dishwasher are both very, very like luxury items. So we feel really lucky to have found this in the middle of like COVID. It was December, 2020 when we found it and it has been our peaceful home in the big city. The other day, my toddler somehow tore this door off of its hinges and so that's why there's only one door. I'm going to add a cafe curtain pole rod thing here and it's going to just cover all the shoes. I'm going to have to take this one off. I think I can manage to fix it, but yeah. Here is the pole that I'm going to use and this is where we just store all of our shoes because it's right near the door and we have a lot of shoes. This is our little entryway and when we moved in, this was just a, everything was white and there was no wall molding or any of that. We added all of that through projects over the years, but there is a phone here that I hid with the mirror. This is what the doorman can call us on. I have added some hooks over here to hold a lot of jackets. We have a coat closet here too, but this has like umbrellas and just everything. So when you walk in, this is our dining room and we look, we eat here every single night and morning really. Like this is a very versatile room because it's also kind of used as a workspace. I usually am on my computer on this table and Brooks's high chair is here, so we're always sitting around the table eating dinner. We really have done a lot to this room since we've lived here. We have painted the room, added ceiling wallpaper, it's paintless wallpaper, added a new light fixture and a ceiling medallion. I'll make sure to share all of the colors of the paint on in the description just so it's in one place. I found these chairs on Facebook Marketplace for $75 for all four total and I think they're so unique. If you find these chairs, if you look on Etsy for this style, they're so expensive. So I was very excited to find these on Facebook Marketplace. So these shelves are in progress. I'm about to actually decorate them for the holidays in a couple days. So for now, we have a wine rack. I house a lot of dishes on here and books and this picnic basket has a lot of my candles in it, olive oil. Yeah, you don't need to show, you don't need to show the bad ones, but I love how this shelf was like the perfect width for this specific wall. This one kind of serves as a bar cart. It has wine glasses, it also has candles and also is where we put our internet modem device. It's a multi-purpose cabinet and I thought it was nice in this corner here before you go into the kitchen area, but before we go into the kitchen area, I'm going to show you the living room, which is right beside the dining room. This is our living room. It's right when you walk in, it's a, you kind of walk down a couple stairs and then it's a sunken in living room, but it is where we spend, I would say most of our time in our apartment and we swapped out the light fixtures, added a ceiling medallion, added ceiling molding. I have, I think I have a whole video on that faux fireplace, which I also have a complete video of. This mantle and or the, I guess the fireplace surround was brought over from our previous apartment, but then I built this section to kind of make it look a little bit more realistic. I know it's still not the most realistic, but it added a whole lot of character to our living room and I just love it so much. And it's something that we can completely take with us or added some sconces with a rechargeable light bulb. So there was no hard wiring needed. And Lenny, this is Lenny, our lemon tree. He is actually growing a lot of lemons, but I didn't know that it takes so long for the lemons to mature and turn yellow. So I think we still have quite a ways to go. To be honest, Lenny is normally sitting on the windowsill with sun because he needs as much sun as possible. As far as fall decorating, I don't really have too many fall decorations, but this is one little ghost candle holder that I have, which I thought was really cute. I have a set of three and just put them right here. I have some in the kitchen. The TV wall. The TV wall has always been a favorite section in the apartment of mine because the TV frame, we actually made it. We basically bought wooden trim, stained it a dark wood color, and literally it's attached by command strips onto the actual TV frame. This is our TV. So this is actually a photo that I took and I edited it to look like a painting, like an old painting of hydrangeas. These are some burgundy hydrangeas that I found in Riverside Park. And so I took a photo and I edited the photo, highly edited the photo to make it look like a painting. And now it's on our TV. Kecia Finley, she lives in New York and she illustrates a bunch of animals and she's just so talented. So that is from her. This piece of furniture, it holds a lot of toys right now. Trains, cars, magma tiles, train tracks, animals, books. This side of it could probably use some more organization, but right now it's just a bunch of books for Brooks. In this corner, I wanted to have like a little tiny desk space after finding this writing desk, added some shelves and painted the wall. There's actually some like beadboard wallpaper on here that gives it some texture. I'm not kidding when I tell you every piece of furniture holds things. There's even this, this holds a bunch of toys. This corner is one of my favorites because of the natural light. When I want to work or if I'm filming like a recipe, especially, which I do that fairly often, I need a lot of bright light and that is why this table is in this corner. But I also added a lamp shade to a plug-in light bulb. Decided to hang this in the corner and I think it's just so beautiful. The ceiling molding, I do have a more detailed tutorial on how that, on those pieces and the supplies I used, but I think the ceiling molding just changed the whole feel of this entire apartment. It just elevated it and made it feel a lot more elegant and a little fancy, I think. Pearl, Pearl has arisen from her nap. Hi, Pearl. So this is Pearl. Oh, stretchy Pearl. This, oh my gosh. Okay, so this is Pearl. As you can see, she is not a small girl, but she is the sweetest, sweetest dog, especially to Brooks. And she loves living right near Central Park. We go on a lot of walks here and she's just a friendly, giant dog. She's very friendly. She always looks sad, but she's actually very happy. That's just what her face looks like. And you can always tell when it's raining because her ears have crimps in them. All right, welcome to the bedroom. This is a great room for natural light. Let's start on this wall. So this wall is probably the one that has undergone the most changes, but we did add wall molding. And I, when doing, like when adding molding to the walls, I try to do it around a piece of furniture and that's how I come up with the layout. So this one, we put three small squares above the bed and two longer boxes on the side. We added a shelf because you can't really tell, but there is a, the wall kind of went out and the wall came out and it made the whole room feel a lot shorter than I wanted it to. So I feel like this just made great use of the entire wall and made it feel taller. We also added ceiling molding to the ceiling, a little bit more subtle than the living room. And then we found a projector screen that we hid, we hide it behind this beam and it rolls up like this and kind of just Velcros together. But we've been using a lot lately with our projector. And then in this corner, it's kind of just like a reading corner. I thought it would be perfect to also hide, you can't tell, but there are some heater or radiators behind here and it's not the prettiest radiator cover. So this piece of furniture helps hide that. Another one of my favorite of all time Facebook marketplace finds was this fireplace surround. It was like $200 and a lady was selling her house and she had this, it was yellow at the time. I put a lot of jewelry, perfume, all sorts of things up here and it holds our mirror. This corner of the bedroom, there's a lot going on. We have the projector that we talked about. We have a lot of clothes that tell myself that I'm going to wear in the near future. A desk that has been transformed to be used as a vanity. This is where I get ready, hair and makeup. This is where I do all of that. We have a steamer closet. Our kitchen area, which is broken up into two different rooms, but this room when we moved in, it was just a refrigerator, empty white room. We added shelves around a skinnier, taller refrigerator and added a cabinet. I found some marble to go on top of the cabinet at a local antique store and painted it. Painted the shelves, painted the walls, added, changed the light fixture and oh, we also added peel and stick tile for like a back splash. It's actually attached to a poster board instead of to the wall because this stuff would not come off the wall. It would damage it and be really hard to remove. So I added poster board to the wall and then added the tile on top of that. And then now we have a kitchen. Well, it's an extension of our real kitchen. Our real kitchen, I'll show you. It has, it's where like the washer dryer is, the stove and sink. So these magnets are just some of my favorite things that I added to the kitchen because they are picture frames. Well, they were frames that we converted to magnets just using like peel and stick magnets. And we had to remove all the hardware off the back, add a ton of magnets because they're kind of heavy. But they're so, they're such a fun way to like add some personal touches to your kitchen. Added some little hooks down here to have colanders and measuring cups. And the other two ghosts that I talked about before are here. They hold candles. Okay, so on this wall is where I kind of have all sorts of things. We have spice jars, fruit baskets, and a coffee shelf. I added some hooks to have mugs and some artwork right here using command strips. And these storage boxes are really nice because they fit on the shelf perfectly, but they also have like tablecloths and cloth napkins stored in them. And I think they're just really cute for storage baskets. I just added these three hooks and somehow I've accumulated quite a lot of bags in this corner. Oh, this rug. This is actually a mat and it looks like tile, but it's a mat that is easy to wipe down. Fluff, fluff head, fluff head. So this is the actual kitchen and I added some peel and stick flooring over some old vinyl flooring that was here previously. Washer and dryer, so thankful for that. So if you're wondering why we haven't switched the washer and dryer to where the refrigerator is, why is the plumbing and how they set it up, the washer and dryer has to be here. We're making some noodles, multitasking here. Oh, orzo for Brooks when he wakes up any minute now. So I have, this window has looked better in the past, but I did have herbs in each pot here and it was like my summer herb garden. And I've added a cafe curtain underneath the shelf. This shelf we built into the window. Sometimes when Brooks's sink is not here, this is Brooks's sink. Sometimes when his sink's not here, it's just nice to sit here and look out the window. It's very nice. So this is a sewing machine drawer and it's kind of where I put coffee, tea bags, sugar packets. Fun fact about Pearl is that she has her own refrigerator. This is Pearl's refrigerator and it is where we have Pearl's turkey recipe. It's actually a freezer. It's a freezer because Pearl's food has, I mean, there is just no way that our food or her food would fit in our refrigerator. So we had to get her her own. Last but not least is Brooks's room. He's sleeping, so I think I'm going to wait a little bit until he wakes up, but his room was one of my favorites to decorate because he was our first, he is our first and only child at the moment. It kind of just made me like feel like a child going back and decorating his room because I wanted it to feel very magical and like a children's book. So in this room, I added curtain rods to the wall to hang some coats and other clothing for Brooks. And you'll find a lot of vintage art and frames in here. The whole room is a mix of old and new and I love how adding old pieces like this cabinet, which used to belong to a music school in New York, made the whole room feel very nostalgic. And in one corner of the room, you'll see a wardrobe that is holding my clothes actually. So we added doors to it to kind of disguise that fact and it used to be an open wardrobe. So we added the doors, we added molding to the doors to elevate it and make it feel more built in. We painted it. This plate rack is used as a bookshelf and under the bookshelf, I added a little kids table. I don't think I've ever put so much attention to detail into one room, but I just had so much fun with this one and I think that really concludes the tour of the apartment. So I hope you enjoyed watching it. I have videos on specific projects that I've mentioned that we've done, but if you have any questions at all, please let me know and I'll answer in the comments. Thank you so so much for watching and I'll see you next time!