Miracles on West 74th Street: Home Sweet Home?

Home Sweet Home?

Well, friends and family - we have finally created a blog for everyone to follow our crazy adventures here in New York. And by "we", I mean me, Denise.

Let me bring everyone up to speed on the past few months - I moved to The Big Apple in April of this year after 3.5 glorious years in Chicago. Unilever decided it would be a good idea to close down our amazing office in Chicago and move us to the thriving metropolis of Englewood Cliffs. I used to overlook Michigan Ave, Lake Michigan and Millennium Park - now I overlook the beautiful Palisades Parkway. Definitely a downgrade.

Sam & Nathan joined me in June. We each had corporate housing for a few months - Nathan & I down in SoHo; Sam in the heart of Times Square. My corporate housing ended the first week in July, so I couch surfed between Nathan and Sam's place for the month. Yeah, who is a grown up now? Once I moved in on the couch, the race was on to find a place. We knew that we wanted to live in the city - no Jersey for us. We decided before we moved from Chicago that the 3 of us would be roommates Will & Grace style. So, we began our search for the perfect 3 bedroom in Manhattan the beginning of July. We had about 3 brokers at one time looking for us. We looked at over 30 places, at least. We initially had our search in the village area and then we realized we couldn't afford it. So we expanded to anything north of Houston and south of 86th street..pretty wide search.

We first saw our place with our one broker, Pam. Nathan and I liked it, but it was one of the first places that we looked at it, so we didn't have a good benchmark yet. After looking at a dozen other places, we saw that our apartment was on our list to look at with our other broker, Sean. We saw it and jumped on it. I find this broker thing in NYC to be a bit ridiculous. I mean, you basically pay someone a month and a half rent "finders fee." Thank goodness the Big U was covering it for us!

So, now here we are. We have been in our apartment now for 3 weeks and it finally looks like a home - complete with our own washer/dryer in unit, normal size kitchen appliances (and updated as well!), 2 bathrooms, window A/C (thank God - I greatly under estimated how much I love air conditioning), hard wood floors throughout and a ton of space! Our total apartment is over 1600 sq.ft. - which is "big" according to NY standards. And it's a real 3 bedroom - you wouldn't believe some of the places we saw that claimed to be a 3 bed...the living room does not count as a bedroom people! Each of us has a closet...again, this is something that we just assumed came with a bedroom, but turns out, we were wrong. And our location is great - Hell's Kitchen. Now, the outside of the building looks a little sketch (as seen from picture above). It's an old warehouse they converted into loft apartments. The staircase up to our place is also super shady. There are also some lawsuits against the management company that are posted by the door, but we were told not to worry - see if this comes back to bite us. But, after hiking up the 4 flights of stairs, the actual apartment is amazing. We all love it. After a dozen trips to Home Depot, numerous trips to Bed Bath and Beyond and 2 torturous trips to Ikea - we now have a place where we can all call home!