Hi Apartment Therapy, I'm Bailey. Welcome to my 200 sq ft apartment in New York City. I've lived here for a little over one year
and I pay $1775 in rent. But I still think it's a pretty good deal for the neighborhood. I knew that a challenge was
going to be fitting my furniture in I have a lot of furniture that has been
passed on my family and that I've collected over the years that's important to me and then
also obviously all the books. You know, I think a quirk of the apartment is just sort of where the door is, like where the fireplace is,
where the window is. It didn't leave me a lot of options
for like where to put things especially the bed. So once I had the bed set up I knew that I wanted to kind of create different sections of the apartment. You know I think in small spaces people really - their instinct is to like put all the
furniture against the wall and have all this room in the
middle of a space but you know I knew that I needed to like,
break it up differently and like that wasn't going to make sense
with how the room is shaped. Biggest splurge was the couch which
cost about $900 plus shipping. Although it wasn't my dream couch
when I found it, I felt like its style worked really well with everything else that I had. It was like exactly the right measurements
that I needed which was kind of crazy. The best part was that there's
actually storage in the cushions. So I was able to store winter coats
and things I don't use very often there. My best find was probably my desk slash dining table. I knew I wanted something round
just because everything else is pretty, you know, square. And found something that would be perfect on
West Elm but it was like almost $400. And just poking around
Facebook Marketplace one day, I saw the same one that
someone was selling for $65. So even that plus the Uber
to get it back here was still, uh less than half the cost. I wanted to create like a little reading
nook and the chair in the corner belonged to my great grandmother and so it was important
for me to find a good place for that. Kind of tucked in the corner and I can look out
the window and people watch. Everything ended up pretty much where I thought it
would go except for the armoire. I really envisioned it being behind the couch against
the wall over there and creating kind of like a dressing area with my closet and then my shoes but when I when I got everything there it just didn't feel right. The armoire it felt too tall it felt unbalanced. So I moved it over which then gave me really a bigger more comfortable workspace
in the end so. With the vintage furniture I think especially making it work for a small space, I had to really rethink how to use things so the top drawer of my dresser I keep my sheets and
linens in there and then the bottom two drawers are clothes. My coffee table is also
my craft storage. The armoire I've always used it in
past apartments to stack my linens to store towels and sheets but
now I use it for my shoe storage. I was able to hang hanging shoe dividers like from
the rack on the inside of there or even even what you already have like the fireplace like
became really good storage space for books. I found a chair on Craigslist that you flip it up
and it becomes a ladder. One of my tips for moving into a
small space is to really take advantage of any time you have before
you actually move in. You know once you get the keys, you know, go
in and clean like mop the floors because once the furniture is in - you can't really move
it around and have the space to really clean. I know the floors in here were filthy before I
moved in that I had to mop twice. The day before I had a handyman to hang
the shelves for books and the pegboard. So that as soon as I moved in,
I had a place to put things away. Yeah this piece used to be a bookshelf but when I moved in here I knew that I would need some extra space for
kitchen stuff and I knew it would be the perfect place to display kind of like my pretty dishes and
really save my kitchen cabinets for food and more unsightly things. The movers were unhappy with
me putting it in there they, they thought that I was making a mistake and that people wouldn't
be able to fit in the kitchen but I make it work. The kitchen is really tiny,
so the pegboard from Ikea
was the first piece that I added
in before I even moved in. And then as I lived in it a little
bit longer I added some baskets I found on Etsy. That I put fruits and vegetables in. I added a little backsplash behind the stove just for grease and things. One thing I bought for the apartment
that I ended up being really obsessed with are these sweater boxes
from the Container Store. They somehow fit like exactly onto the shelf that I had in my closet. I have four of them, they have little windows
so you can see what's inside. I haven't done a ton of DIY in this
apartment but the bathroom was really ugly. And I tried to live with it for a while and then
decided that it really needed a new coat of paint. And I also put on contact paper on the vanity. It was amazing how both those things improved my my happiness in the apartment So yeah when I first moved in I was
concerned about the lack of light and only having one window but I just decided to
sort of like lean into it and really create this cozy space that doesn't really need to be brightly
lit you know I put lamps in different parts of the apartment and I turn on different
lamps depending on kind of how bright I wanted to be or what kind of mood. I found a few low-light plants that
really work here: a Pothos, a ZZ plant, and a Fern. I feel like I get really inspired by kind
of the English Country design and and part of that is because I feel
like it just looks really lived in and and cozy and I feel like my style is very much like how to make all of that come together. You know the old and the new. Probably my favorite element of the apartment is a drawing I have that my mom
drew of me when I was little, based on a photo that she really liked of me. She wasn't an artist or anything she just liked to - we just like to do crafts growing up. She passed away when I was in college
and I like found it in a box and decided to get it framed, I have it, you know, in my
little reading nook which she really instilled in a love of reading for me so it just
feels like a really nice special memory of her My mom was always telling me
that I would live in New York or live in some big city and I kind of would
brush her off. But, you know, now I kind of sit
in my chair and I think that this is kind of exactly the life that
she would have imagined.
