I had big plans to document our apartment search/redecorating on the blog but before I knew it we had picked an apartment, painted the walls, and bought new furniture (where does the time go?!) so needless to say….that didn’t happen. But I did want to share a few things since this has been by far our favorite apartment we have moved into.
A little background for you before I jump into the fun stuff! We currently live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and we love our neighborhood. It is removed enough from the touristy nyc sites but still has awesome restaurants and bars to check out. Our old building is currently converting into condos and we did have a choice to resign, but they were asking close to $10,000 per month for rent (which is waaay more than we were paying)?! Clearly we were not smoking the same stuff as the new management company so we decided to start our search for a new place.
The thing about moving in nyc is that it is an undesirable process anyway you cut it and the new place has to be well worth the headache. Since we didn’t really have an option to stay both D and I were a little worried about finding a great place as we could not just say “not meant to be, we will look next year”. After about a month and a half of looking we found a terrific 2 bedroom 1 ½ bath still in our area, and closer to the subway!
Everything moved pretty quickly from there. Once we signed for the place we were moved in the following week so decisions like paint and large furniture were made fairly quickly. The most exciting thing about this apartment was we decided to paint! As most know painting rentals is always a gamble. This time though, we are leasing a condo not rental property so the landlord is pretty cool about painting as long as we turn it back to white before leaving. We decided to go with a gray color for the walls and keep the trim and ceiling white. There are so many grays out there but I knew I wanted to go on the darker side and have more blue/purple tones than brown/green. Above are a few options we consider but in the end we went with Benjamin Moore Trout Gray.
Some may say the color is too dark for the room and their liking but D and I are in love with it. It also helps that one of the walls and the front closet are floor-to-ceiling mirrors which opens the room up with the reflecting light. My favorite thing about the paint is at different points in the day the room looks more blue, purple, or gray (sometimes even green but I think that had more to do with the light bulbs we used to have). Our super asked if we were sure about painting the narrow hallway to the kitchen and I implusively said yes a little nervous it might make the whole apartment too dark. I am so glad I went with my gut, having the hallway painted really pulls the apartment together and creates a great flow. I am even debating finishing off the small amount if wall in the kitchen with the gray as well.