What $1,300 gets you in the Upper West Side | NYC Apartment Tours (2 bedroom rent stabilized)

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

hi hello how's it going it's elena welcome back to my channel i hope you're doing well i'm excited i'm bringing you guys another episode of buzzed in an apartment series i have on this channel today we're headed to the upper west side i should say back to the broadside because i've actually done a video there before um today we're visiting hattie and it's exciting episode because her apartment is rent stabilized which is rare and i haven't done any videos like that before her apartment is gorgeous stumbled across it on my tick tock i think a bit ago and filmed this episode a few weeks ago so excited to share with you guys i usually do a little history section with these apartment videos but since i've done the upper west side before i've already done the whole history spiel so i'll link the video below as well as putting a little card so you can check that out for yourself if you enjoy this video it would mean a lot if you could subscribe i make a lot of these types of apartment videos so there will be more to come and on that note let's go ahead to hattie's hi my name is hattie i live on the upper west side of manhattan in a two bedroom apartment and i pay 1300 a month it is rent stabilized that's why i we'll get into that later so right now we're standing in my foyer this is right when you walk in through the front door this is bartholomew he's an old piece from my mom and we have a gallery wall over here coat closet right here is the first bedroom but first i'm gonna take you down the hallway into the living room i grew up in this apartment so i have lived here since i was 10.

that explains the rent stabilized price my parents found a really great deal and were smart and held onto it for me i've always lived here there is not an inch of the space that i have not changed or at least painted the living room is the room that's changed the most i would say growing up there were walls that were built over the doors and there was like built-in shelving first thing i did when my parents moved out was tear down those walls from the living room you can access either of the bedrooms which is really nice i think my favorite part of the apartment aside from the pocket doors i love the wall moldings those are all original in my designs i really wanted to kind of play into that parisian aesthetic is that one of the like tv what is that oh yeah tbr i feel like i keep seeing them it's just it's a frame tv a samsung frame tv so you can like buy like an art download and set it as the background and then this frame thing is just like a magnet called a bevel so you can kind of disguise it this is my little writing desk this is actually my mom's when she was a kid over here i just keep extra decor christmas decorations stuff like that i think having a dresser in the living room is such a game changer because it's just like that extra storage and over here is our little dining knife this art is actually an art download from bff print shop which is amazing they have 15 downloads and you can get anything so i get my art from my tv there too so i had it printed on canvas to give it like kind of like a more realistic look and then i made the frame out of leftover wall molding it's a super simple diy i have tutorials on my instagram so growing up this was my parents bedroom and when my parents moved out i made it my bedroom i love having my bed in between the windows here this is my other fireplace sticky tiles on top of the original tile so they were brown and just not my bag i wanted to somehow get a mirror on top that would give it like a built-in look i found this mirror at a vintage shop it was just original wood so i painted it to match the fireplace and i felt that like the lines and kind of the boxiness of it reflected this design so i thought it was a really good fit one of my other favorite things here is this portrait it was done by my grandmother on my dad's side she was an artist i didn't really know her that well so it's nice to have little bits and pieces of her around with my home i sourced this dresser i found it on etsy for 50 bucks i refinished it last summer there were like a million layers of paint on it but i wanted to get it down to the natural wood and there's beatrice behind the camera she's like what's this this is one of my favorite pieces that i've gotten the perfect shades for reading sipping tea in the winter i can also sit here and watch the tv which is pretty perfect and i actually found it at target you won't believe it now we can come this way this hallway probably is one of my favorite parts it feels so old school like you literally feel like you're living in 1890 when the building was built these are from my grandparents first house together they lived in a log cabin in kentucky i have like an extra clothes closet here utility closet where i keep the cat's litter boxes which is great outside out of mine up here we're back in the entry now we can come into this room this was my childhood bedroom i think this was the first room that i painted when my parents moved out which was three years ago i just painted it white and then i recently painted it this kind of off-white color the thing i really love about this apartment is all of the trim work around the doors and around the windows so i got these are eight foot tall bookshelves and i just have a lot of old books that i've collected throughout the years a lot from my childhood some from my mom's childhood my mom was an art historian so i have a lot of old art books i don't know i just grew up with like an appreciation for old things my mom had me at like the met like twice a week i always like to have a mix of vintage and modern for example modern shelves but old things on them i have a very kind of modern light fixture but then i like to kind of ground the space wood furniture and antiques fun fact about this light i have no light switch in this room i don't know why i guess 1890 things though i had to get remote controlled light bulbs and so that's how i control it i wanted a rating desk here everybody says it's like carrie bradshaw i was looking for one for a really long time like this exact size i knew i wanted something antique i couldn't find anything i almost bought another one and then that very same day i got a text from a really good family friend who was in new york cleaning out her mother-in-law's apartment because she had passed away and this woman was like a grandmother to me she was like we have a couple pieces of furniture that haven't been claimed by the family would you be interested and i was like yeah what are they so they said you picture and it was this and it was so crazy because down to the inch it's exactly what i was looking for this is my green velvet sofa it's amazing it actually pulls out into a queen-size bed so i can still use this room as a guest room now we're standing in the back end of the apartment that's off the hallway this is the one part of the apartment that's like super classic new york just tiny kitchen tiny bathroom very old school but it's cozy it's very cozy for two in here my parents kind of renovated it they had put they put in these ikea cabinets and they put in the sink because when we moved in it was the original 1890 kitchen so i think the reason it's so small is because in 1890 they didn't have dishwashers or refrigerators or any of that really so they really didn't have a need for a big kitchen this way is a really cool part of the it is my butler's pantry i've honestly never seen another apartment with a pantry like this so i think it's such a special space and it's really nice that i have a lot of extra cupboards we installed these little led strip lights i got them on amazon for like i don't know 15 bucks but they're perfect because before this was kind of like a dark space we built these little shelves just with wood i made a little pantry and then another cool part is the dumb wader which has been bolted up back in the day it was functioning you could put maybe bring trash down to the basement i'm not really sure what exactly it was used for but you could bring stuff to other floors and this is the least exciting part the little bathroom everything when we moved in everything was original it was like a really low sink with like a separate hot water tap and a cold water towel i had them put in a new sink and like a new lighting situation and a new mirror the tiles were really old and cracked so this is a good hack if you live in a pre-work building in new york the tiles will probably not be in great shape so i actually just painted them with a really good adherent primer and then i just put paint on top of them and it kind of hides a lot of the imperfections i'm a lifelong native new yorker i am a special a teacher i'm an instagram content creator mostly in the design space and like new york city living space and i also do a little bit of interior design here and there i didn't go to school for it but people started asking me if i would do it and i was like i mean sure i'm super lucky to have this as my childhood home i was able to take the lease over from my parents when they retired and kind of moved out to the country three years ago now best best thing about this apartment is that it's rent stabilized so i pay 1300 a month which is you know a third of what it could be if it were market rate so i'm forever grateful for that rent stabilization and rent control are really special features of new york rent control is very rare i believe it's less than one percent of apartments in new york city are rent controlled it's either you or a direct family member has had to have been living in it continuously since july of 1971 and these are the people who will pay you know 500 bucks for like a five bedroom apartment but it's impossible to get so rent stabilized apartments are way more common they're actually about of new york city apartments it just means that you are protected from your rent increasing past a certain percentage for me it's like 2.5 per lease renewal last year it went up like i don't know under 100 so it's not bad if you can find a rent stabilized apartment and you know that you want to stay in it a long time it's definitely a good move because you'll be protected from market value rent increases i am so grateful for my upbringing here i just think it's an amazing experience i think here you grow up really street smart and really cultured and you just never you see a lot so you're never going to be surprised by anything i went to elementary school in hell's kitchen so i would walk through like broadway and like all the broadway shows all the time and my mom worked as an art historian so she had me in all these fancy galleries and like the met and the moma all the time so i just grew up around all of that with central park as my backyard a lot of people probably are apprehensive about raising kids in new york but if you're thinking about it i would say definitely do it they will be grateful for it because i think i have kind of a blend of a few different ones but my biggest inspiration are like parisian apartments i think at its bones this apartment kind of reflects that style and then my neighborhood to the upper west side has a lot of kind of parisian-inspired architecture so i think i wanted to mimic that in my designs but i will say that i have changed things a thousand times and i always will i just enjoy the design process so much that i'm always kind of wanting to challenge myself i would say if you are designing a space and you're really intimidated by it i would say just go on pinterest or find your inspo images make a mood board and then look for similarities in all of those to see like what it is that you're attracted to so for me it was the high ceilings it was the wall moldings and then i started looking at the kind of furniture that they had in those spaces and i was able to kind of pick things out that i like another big tip is don't just go to ikea don't just walk into any big box store and just buy things it's so much more fun to go to an antique store or go thrifting or in new york you can just pick stuff off the street that just gives the space a special collected feel and makes it unique i love living on the upper west side it's definitely quieter there's like a lot of families who come to live here i think because we have central park and we have riverside park and so many playgrounds i love also being removed from like the hustle and bustle of new york i love coming home to a quiet street i'm right by the park as i said i've just been super grateful to have new york as my home for my whole life it's just an amazing place we