life in nyc | existential dilemmas

I don’t know if there are words to express how much I LOVE my new apartment. For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, I have been living at home for FOUR years. If that doesn’t sound pathetic… Anyway, when I moved home I left a lot of my stuff in storage (more on that later) because when you go from a three-bedroom home to a studio there just isn’t room for everything.

Most people who move from just about anywhere in the U.S. to New York find themselves downsizing dramatically. I, however, am not most people. I cannot explain how excited I am to have a bedroom, and kitchen with more than two cupboards, and an actual living area where there’s room for some kind of sofa, and a bathroom where the ceiling doesn’t slant. And now, I give you my new apartment…in progress.

This is the entry way. It’s a long, narrow hallway. The bathroom is off to the left.

The bathroom. I have to have two shower curtains to go around the whole tub, but that’s okay. In some apartments in New York, the shower head is not at one end of the tub, but in the middle. I was so excited to see that such was not the case in my apartment. And my little sink with my little mirror. Guess who’s throwing out all kinds of beauty stuff.

My living room/kitchen combo. Finding an apartment with this in my budget was not super easy. There’s enough room in the living room for me to get two loveseats and have an entertainments center of sorts. Amazing. Additionally, I have a fabulous breakfast bar, which means no need for a kitchen table…which I don’t have room for. However, that box under the bar on the right contains the most amazing foldable table that, when not in use, fits right there and will give me FOUR extra drawers. And, in case you were wondering, my kitchen is HUGE by New York standards. Huge!

And here is my bedroom! I have an actual bedroom (I thought for sure I would be in a studio.) And it has TWO windows which means lots of natural light. I just purchased this fabulous bed (still need to finish it) that will actually fit my luggage under it. In New York, it is all about storage space…as in, no one has any, so you have to get creative. I LOVE this bed. (The “bedspread” is a temporary fix…I didn’t have room to pack my bedding on the flight).

The closet you see here is the ONLY one in the entire apartment which means I will have to get creative with my clothes. Thus the bed with four drawers and a cabinet. I will also been purchasing a dresser of some sort. And my shoes…well, I got a shoe rack for the back of my door that will hold 36 pairs. Too bad that’s only about half of my shoes. I’ll figure it out. Part of me figuring it out is me selling all kinds of stuff. Clothes, shoes, books, kitchen things, and a number of pieces of furniture.

If you live in Utah County and want to know what I’m selling, shoot me an email at chloe.elizabeth@yahoo.com.

This week I said goodbye to a dear friend. (This is not a post about dying…so please don’t worry.) I sold my Honda. Below, you will see the pretty pictures of my happy car. The sale of this car marked the beginning of my big move to the big city. I have been so excited to move to New York. So. Excited. But with the end of school, and now the end of my automobile ownership, I am really starting to feel that this move will not be all sunshine and roses. There will be homesickness and adjustments, missing my friends and my family. And I know there will be lots of moments when I will wish that owning a car in New York city made any kind of sense for me.

Thankfully, the process was not super difficult. I listed it on Craigslist. Received an email the next day. And voila, after a test drive and the buyer’s mechanic checking it out, we had a sale. On Tuesday morning, I met the buyer at the DMV and handed over my title. I felt like a real grown up. It was weird.

This was MY very first car. By that, I don’t mean that it’s the first car I ever drove (that was a VW Rabbit convertible…a super beater car–an ’84 in ’95–and I LOVED it ), but it was the first car that I bought all on my own and it was brand new at the time (something I will likely never do again). I paid it off a little over a year and a half ago. So the car was totally and completely mine. And now it’s totally and completely someone else’s.

And so begins the big move to NYC. I have a couple more weeks before I head out to secure an apartment…just wait until you hear what that entails. I’ll just say this…if you ever want to rent an apartment in New York, you should not have lived with your dad during graduate school. You should have stellar credit. And you must make 40x the rent. It’s going to be a painful experience finding somewhere to live is all I can say.