Hello!

Hello lovelies!   

I have always loved all things home—design, cooking, entertaining.  Okay, honestly.  There is a 1950s housewife inside of me screaming to be set free.  This is why I’m so excited to have two new projects to take on—working with my sister to transform both of our Brooklyn apartments into well-designed homes.

A Midwesterner at heart, I was truly shocked the first time I came to NY.  The noise, the cabs, the amount of people…I felt like I needed a padded room to recover.  When my husband (who was my fiancé at the time) got transferred here for work, I “waited behind” (read: stalled) in Chicago while I finished up my job and he scoped out apartments.

For any of you familiar with the NYC rental market, you can imagine what a COMPLETE AND UTTER FREAKING NIGHTMARE it is to find an apartment that checks all the boxes in terms of design, space, rent, convenience, neighborhood, etc.  And by complete and utter freaking nightmare I mean it’s not possible.  Luckily, my sweet husband was able to find an apartment in a great part of Manhattan-- Battery Park City.  We settled in and were happy to be able to look out of (one) of our windows and see trees.  Despite the great neighborhood, the apartment was tiny, cookie cutter and carried a colossal rent.  Every month when we wrote the rent check a small piece of me died.

Fast forward to August 2011.  We received a letter from our management company letting us know that it was time to renew our lease for 2012 and that…wait for it….our rent had been increased by 20%.  No, no need to reread that.  TWENTY PERCENT.

After politely telling our management company to shove it that we wouldn’t be renewing for 2012, it dawned on us that we had one month to find a new apartment.  Cue panic.

BUT THEN. OH, BUT THEN.  I got the call from Sarah that she was moving to New York!  Cue panic (the good kind).  If there is anything that anyone knows about me, it is that Sarah is my other half.  The thought of living near her juuuuust about put me over the edge.  Once I began to breathe again, we commenced The Great Apartment Hunt of the Common Era. We quickly decided that we were both looking for the exact same things in our ideal apartments: charm, reasonable rent (I’m looking at you, Battery Park City. I’m looking. at. you.), close proximity to trains, lots of light, great neighborhood…the list went on and on.  After a little research, we realized that Brooklyn was where we wanted to be.

After a weekend of trekking through the heat, seeing 30 apartments and fighting with our husbands in front of each other (yep, that happened) we found two GREAT apartments.  This blog will chronicle our turning these rental apartments into homes that we can grow into with our families and build memories in together as a fearless foursome. We can’t wait to share our adventures in life and design with all of you!

                                                                                                            Love,

                                                                                                                        Julie