00:00Hi, I'm Allison. Welcome to my sweet duplex. I mean, digs. Before you come in,
00:04subscribe below. Okay, great. Come on in. I live in Harlem with my boyfriend Matt.
00:09Our rent is $27.50 a month, which we split. Overall, I think it's horribly
00:16inflated, but you know, for here it's good. It's also an improvement from our
00:20last apartment, which was about $200 or $300 more dollars a month. It was
00:24probably about half the square footage that this is. I think the space is
00:28probably 1,200 square feet. Does that include the garden? With the garden, I
00:32would say maybe a couple hundred more. We moved in about five months ago from a
00:36much smaller apartment on the Upper West Side. We moved to New York from Kentucky,
00:40so there was maybe a bit of a sticker shock. I actually have a house there, so it
00:44was weird to move from a house that I own to an apartment that I have to rent for
00:48way, way, way more money every month.
00:56So you enter straight into our dining room here, which connects to the kitchen and bar
01:02area. I feel like we split the cooking pretty evenly. We do not split the cleaning. Matt
01:06does most of it. I really hate doing the dishes. I do the dishes probably 9 out of 10 times.
01:11She uses 19 spoons a day probably, being liberal there, I think. I like anything that can go
01:17in like one dish or a pot or the crock pot. I like things that are more involved. I
01:20like making pasta, some heavier dishes. One item that we have here that it's tied
01:24to our relationship is this French menu that I bought from Matt. It was the first
01:27thing I ever bought him because he had been living in Paris for a year before we
01:31met. It was an awesome way to sort of, you know, let me know how much he liked me. I
01:34really liked it. What would you say our favorite part of the neighborhood is?
01:37Personally, the commute down to 59th Street, where I work, super super easy. I guess my
01:41favorite part of the neighborhood is how accessible the north side of
01:45Central Park is because it's not quite as manicured as maybe the middle of it
01:48is and I really like that kind of wild feeling because it feels like you can
01:52explore and get lost in it. And then through here is our bedroom. The worst
01:57part about living in this apartment is probably that you have to walk through
02:00the bedroom to get to the bathroom. It kind of is unfortunate when we have
02:04guests stay over. Compared to our last apartment, we had a bed that was lofted so
02:09you had to walk up a rickety ladder to get to it. In comparison, this one seems so
02:14much better. But it's nice that it's spacious because we have a queen-sized
02:17bed now and if we wanted to put a king in here we could. The worst part about
02:20living with Matt is that he's under the impression that I absorb about three
02:24quarters of this bed at night, which is not true. I absolutely stick to my half,
02:29but it's a source of tension. I think she actually lies completely horizontal so she
02:34takes up 100% of the bed for the record. I would love to take credit for the
02:40wallpaper behind me but that was actually put in by our landlord before we moved
02:44in. Over here we have our very small bathroom. Hopefully in our next move we'll
02:49have one that's a little bit nicer and isn't in the bedroom, especially because
02:53I consider this to be sort of a sanctuary for me, which basically just means I like
02:58drinking in the shower. This is our terrace outside of our bedroom that has a
03:02spiral staircase leading down to the garden area. There's nothing out there yet,
03:06but I'm hoping to put in some like fairy lights and hanging gardens and then we
03:10can head back through here to the living room. We found the majority of our
03:14furniture on Craigslist. I think it's nice to to buy something off of somebody
03:18else because they need the money, I need the furniture, and it's good for the
03:23planet to give something a second life. For the trash finds, just kind of go out on
03:27trash day and wander between the suburban rows of houses. You're guaranteed to find
03:31something. I moved to New York City for my master's, which was in history of design and
03:35curatorial studies. I don't think that my budget is quite matched up with my taste,
03:40just having studied like extremely high-end design in school because that's
03:45sort of all you look at. So my favorite home find is probably this chair from
03:49Crate and Barrel originally, and I spent maybe three days pulling the stains out of it.
03:54I remember the vacuum was on for like three days straight, just like Allison down here
03:58trying to get the stains up, but it works. It looks really, really beautiful. My
04:00favorite home find is probably this lamp we got. It's a floor lamp from Ikea. We got off
04:04Regulus for around $15. Our most sentimental piece of furniture is
04:07probably the coffee table, which your dad made for us. It's beautiful. It's this
04:11live edge table with hairpin legs. My father's a woodworker, and when we moved in
04:15together he gave us this table as a gift, as a keepsake, so super sentimental for us.
04:19You might have noticed there's a ton of wall space down here, and a lot of our
04:23furniture is sort of white and cream. So instead of like buying something, I'm
04:28actually a trained artist. So I just went and bought a canvas and painted this huge
04:32painting behind me to try to bring some more life into this space. It took me
04:36several months to do it, but that was probably owed to my own neuroticism about
04:42the colors and shifting those back and forth all the time. Our strategy for
04:46finding this apartment was kind of just let's hit every button on Street Easy
04:51that we want, but we don't actually think it's going to be attainable. And this
04:55is the only place that came up, so we jumped in the subway and came up here and
04:59signed the papers. We met on Tinder about four years ago. He was the first person
05:04that I went out with, and I think it was the same for you, and we went to a coffee
05:08shop on a Sunday morning. It went really well. The best part about living
05:12together is that I get to see you all the time. Yeah, I mean like, you know, I love
05:17your company, so it's great. Yeah, we used to do long distance, which was really
05:21really hard, and now that we have a space to share together that's big and
05:23beautiful. It makes it a lot easier, I think, on a relationship.
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