rental apartment projects that i would absolutely tackle again.
(even though most of them i can't take with me when we move.)
I’ve worked more on this improving this apartment than any that I’ve ever lived in. In part, because it needed it, and in part because I did. We moved into this 800-square-foot floor of a Brooklyn brownstone in September of 2020. I had a seventh-month-old baby, a three-year-old, and a six-year-old. We’d spent the previous seven months of the pandemic living in a one-bedroom, top-floor apartment of half the size while offices and shops, schools and playgrounds were shuttered around us. In so many ways, this apartment gave us breathing room. It’s been our comfort and our sanctuary, and slowly caring for it has been, frankly, a joy.
As we continue our increasingly frenzied search for a new sanctuary to make ours, I’ve been reflecting on everything that I did to improve this place, and everything I can surely do wherever we land next. It’s unlikely that in our budget that we’ll end up in an apartment that’s been very carefully cared for and so I’m preparing myself to roll up my sleeves once again. I’m reminding myself that it’s possible to polish a bit of charm into a rental apartment that has been benignly neglected as this one, or else been stripped to its generic bones and swathed in grey laminate.
In the spirit of curiosity and can-do, I decided to compile a list of projects I completed in this place. These projects don’t reflect everything I wanted to do—the wishlist of improvements needed in this old apartment is quite long indeed—but they do reflect projects that I could do myself and without vast resources that changed the feeling and utility of this space. Every one of these projects has made it more pleasant to live in this apartment, day in and day out.
To the best of my memory, I’ve written this list in the same quixotic and haphazard order that I tackled these projects and have provided the approximate costs (less the hidden cost of my considerable labor). Some of these projects I started while the ink was still drying on our lease. The cardboard candle covers for the chandelier arrived to the apartment before we did, for instance, and James and I went to the hardware store to buy lengths of new screen on the very first day that we were given the keys. Other projects, I finished much more recently. Painting my pink jewel box of a bathroom was something I didn’t find the energy or inspiration to tackle until six months ago. I only wish I could enjoy it for longer.
As written, the costs reflect what supplies for those projects would have cost had I paid for them out-of-pocket, but for transparency, I’ve marked the few that were paid for through brand partnerships with asterisks. In most of those cases, a similar effect could have been achieved with a smaller budget: using simple wooden cabinet knobs, or secondhand ones, instead of new brass ones, for instance, or color-matching gallons of less expensive paint. This isn’t to disparage the true cost of what I used, just to encourage anyone on a budget—myself included—that it’s possible to make things beautiful with less money.