00:00Hi everyone, I'm Bit. And I'm Ash. Welcome to our haunted sweet digs. Don't worry,
00:04she's a friendly ghost. Make sure before you come in you subscribe below or she'll
00:08haunt you. Come on in. We are in Bed-Stuy. We're on the ground floor of a
00:15brownstone. We pay $19.25 a month in rent. That's a really good deal for this
00:20area right now. Back in North Carolina though, we would have paid, you know, a
00:24third of that for the same space. It's about 900 square feet. We found this
00:28place through our friend, who is now our landlord. We came to our housewarming
00:32and it was amazing and we asked to move in immediately.
00:38Welcome to the living room. My style is very like, I like old things. I like things
00:44that have history, things that are like maybe a little bit banged up. I prefer
00:47things to be like clean and modern and bright. Ash always loves the mid-century
00:51modern and I always love the Victorian stuff. Fussy. Yeah. Decorative. It has
00:57the habit of collecting old glass bottles, which is really super fine, except for the
01:05quantity. I can never get rid of them because she senses it. I just like feel
01:09it. I'll be in another room and I'm like, ooh. I just got a horrible feeling just now.
01:13We like to decorate with art pieces that have been made for us by family. My
01:17great-aunt Alta Sims made that oil painting. It's a copy of a lithograph that
01:22would have been popular in the 1800s. My mom was getting rid of it and I was like,
01:27don't you dare get rid of that. I got a circular saw for Ash for her birthday. I
01:31hated our old coffee table, so I was like immediately next day in the basement
01:36making a new table. I learned to build things from my dad, who grew up building
01:39things on a farm. Two-year-olds playing with circular saws. It's good. When we
01:43first moved in, this marble fireplace had been painted white and one day we were
01:47like, I wonder what's at the bottom of all that white paint. So we got a razor blade
01:51and we chipped some of it off and it was like real Carrera marble. And we thought it was
01:55gonna be like an hour project, like we were just gonna... but no. It was a month.
02:00There were just so many layers of old paint. This is our kitchen. The space is
02:04kind of weird shaped and there's not a lot of counter space. Our kitchen table we
02:08got from a place called Nightwood in New York. They make custom wood pieces. This
02:12ended up being about $1,500 all told. They let us pay in multiple installments so
02:17it wasn't like a huge burden. Definitely our big splurge, but you know, we'll keep it
02:21forever. I am a librarian. I work in a video archive for a media company. I work
02:26at a music company as a facilities person. I do a lot of the same stuff that I do
02:30around the house, which is like, you know, home improvement type stuff. Here's the
02:37bathroom. I really don't like having a windowless bathroom. There are so many
02:41plants that thrive in the bathroom environment, like ferns and orchids. I
02:44just feel really sad thinking of all the things I can't grow in here because
02:47there's no natural light. This is our bedroom. We love Ikea and our favorite
02:53Ikea furniture is just the lowest end, plain pine pieces. They just last forever
02:58like since it's just screws and wood you can take them apart and put them back
03:02together. Definitely the way to go. Like our bedroom was like 50 bucks. The side
03:06tables were like $11. This is also the room where we had our first experience
03:10with our ghost. The basement ghost. We were falling asleep one night and Ash was
03:16suddenly wide awake and she was like, did you hear that? I was like, no I didn't hear
03:19anything. She was like something just knocked three times under my side of the
03:22bed. And I was like, you're dreaming. Go back to sleep. So then I was falling asleep
03:28and I heard it. It was just like, and I was like, Ash, I heard it. Did you hear it?
03:32She was like, no, I didn't hear it that time. When we first moved in and realized that
03:37maybe we had a ghost, we did a thing where we just sort of asked the ghost to
03:41protect the apartment instead of harming it. In the mail two days later we got a
03:46fire extinguisher that was misdelivered to our house. It was a very literal
03:49interpretation of like protect the house but I mean I'll take it. Yeah she's
03:54pretty chill though. Like as far as roommates go, she doesn't take up a lot
03:56of space. She's pretty quiet. This is the second bedroom but we use it as a
04:06combination workspace and plant room. So on this side of the bookshelf is mine. I don't
04:11like about this room that it's just really narrow. It's supposed to be a
04:14second bedroom but you can't really use it that way. If I could redo the space I
04:17would just make it like a normal shape. This is my corner of the workroom and
04:21this is my cozy little nook with a heater right next to me and my like
04:25favorite chair and then like all my books. This is basically where I hang out
04:29when it's cold. And this way to the backyard. When we first moved into this house
04:34collectively as a household we were prepping the backyard. When they tested the
04:37soil they found out that it was actually really high in lead and arsenic which is
04:41apparently a big issue in Brooklyn. Everything that you see that we grow to
04:44eat is in soil that we had to like carry in through our apartment in buckets.
04:50Usually we grow salad greens in there. We have a lot of herbs over here.
04:55Strawberries, blackberries, apples, cherries and I think that's a grapevine growing up
05:00the water. Yeah, Concord. When Trump won the election we were like oh okay it's the
05:04apocalypse we're all gonna die. In the coming starving times we want to at
05:08least have some protein so we decided to raise quail. They each produce a single
05:13egg a day so when we have a full flock of ten hens that's ten quail eggs a day.
05:19I make a lot of quail egg soufflés. One thing that we're really gonna do this year
05:23is raccoon proof because it turns out raccoons can open latches with their
05:28little hands and they're very smart. The baby quail that we have inside were
05:32hatched from these. We hatched them in an incubator and we just gathered the eggs out
05:36here. We met at a party in North Carolina. A pig pickin' which is where you put a
05:41suckling pig over chicken wire, cinder block, fire which is very southern. Yeah. So I
05:47was super nervous and I had this big plate of pork in front of me that I just
05:50couldn't eat. Too nervous to eat. Like I'm also like scared of parties so I had
05:54like found a vantage point at the beginning where I could like sit and
05:58observe everybody and like chain smoke and like act like I was too cool to talk to
06:02everybody and I saw her from like across the yard she just shaved her head and I
06:06was like I'm gonna talk to that one. And then Bit just walked up to me and she's
06:10like are you gonna eat that? And I was like no. She's like okay and she just
06:13literally took it in her hands and ate it. Like a wild animal. And so we were kind of
06:19like glued to each other for the rest of the party because I was like she's awkward I'm
06:22awkward. Like this is gonna work. I talk to people at parties now. Yeah congrats. Thank you.
06:26We've both grown as people. We got married at the courthouse in Brooklyn.
06:31Gamer to just been legalized. We were really excited to get married. We spent
06:35like a hundred bucks on like a giant keg of beer and just invited everybody we
06:41could think of and just threw a huge party. I don't think we're gonna move
06:44until we're ready to buy a house. Which could be never. Yeah I mean our
06:48situation is like one in a million like beautiful situation so. We're never gonna
06:52get a place this nice. No and with the current market rates we're never gonna
06:56buy a place either.
