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This week on Sweet Digs, we explore the light and bright Burbank home of Jessica James. She refinished this small space to make the most of every nook. Watch this episode of Sweet Digs to see inside her California home!

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High rent, small spaces, nosy neighbors β€” we put up with A LOT of things to live where we love. In Sweet Digs, Refinery29 gets a peek inside the homes of the coolest people we know, from tiny studios to sprawling houses, and ask the real questions like, "Wait, how much is your rent?"

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Transcript
00:00Hi my name is Jessica and welcome to My Sweet Digs where I share 460 square feet
00:05with my fiancee. Before you come in make sure to hit the subscribe button below.
00:08Come on in.
00:13I live in Burbank California next to the Warner Brothers Studios. I live here with
00:17my fiancee Dean and we've been living together for almost two years. I bought
00:21this place for $259 which I thought was a lot at the time but now that it's
00:25selling for $375 I think I got a good deal. This is the closet that I turned
00:29into the office also known as the clothis. The reason I call it clothis is
00:33because originally it was a sliding door closet but I needed more square footage
00:38so I actually took off the doors added a hanging light painted the inside and
00:42stuck my desk in there. Now it's my little office area. Right behind the door when
00:46you enter you're gonna see our travel map. My fiancee and I signify all the gold
00:50pins for places that we've been together. All of the white pins are places he's
00:54been himself and all the black pins are places I go by myself. Every time we go to
00:58a new place it's kind of fun to come home and stick another pin on the map.
01:01Right below it I actually hung a walking stick. We took a trip to Japan and climb
01:06Mount Fuji and every time we hit another checkpoint all the way up to the summit
01:10we got a little stamp so it's one of the hardest trips that we've been on
01:13together but it really built our relationship so it's really important to
01:16us. This is the kitchen. When I first started house hunting I had a long list of
01:21must-haves. I had to have outdoor space I had to have two rooms I had to have
01:26indoor washer and dryer a gas stove and central air and I got one of them. I
01:31think cooking is one of the things that my fiancee Dean and I like to do a lot
01:35together because we have the one must-have in here he loves to make
01:39chicken wings he's the best and I love to make quinoa that my mom taught me to
01:43make. To utilize the vertical space I actually had somebody who does a lot of
01:47work on my parents house build these octagon shelves for me. We kind of house
01:51our plants some of our family pictures and every time we drink a bottle of wine
01:54we name it and we stick it in this. My biggest regret with designing this space
02:01it's kind of a love-hate relationship was picking white floors. I think it was a
02:06good idea because the white floors make the 460 square feet feel bigger however
02:11anytime you move furniture anytime you walk in here you're gonna leave a scuff so
02:15I guess it's something I just have to deal with. You would think that this is a
02:18shoes-off household because everything is so white but I really don't care just
02:22walk on in. Welcome to the dining room area. This dining room set actually didn't
02:28start as a set the table is for my parents three of the chairs are from a
02:32thrift store and one of the chairs is from a flea market. We painted everything
02:36white and added the same fabric on top of the seats to make it my dining room set.
02:40It's actually a place that we end up piling everything on when we walk through the
02:45door our work bag our jackets everything ends up here so the next day we have to
02:48clear it off again. The most sentimental piece is probably the hutch. It is
02:53currently our mini bar but it wasn't always a mini bar. It was actually my
02:57parents China cabinet that was in their first home so when I bought my first
03:01property it was kind of like a rite of passage. When you live in a small space you
03:05may think that you need certain things but after a while you realize you don't
03:09utilize it as much as you should. So we had a small couch at one point and no one
03:14ever sat on it so we swapped it out for a credenza from CB2. I can't really
03:19remember how much it costs I think I block out things I have to pay full
03:23price for but if I had to guess probably around three or four hundred dollars. Dean
03:27actually did a lot of his work from this dining table so having a little bit of
03:31extra storage for his work stuff and a lot of other things that were laying
03:34around the house was way more important than a couch. My favorite piece in the
03:38entire place is probably also the most functional. My dad built a pony wall
03:44slash shoe caddy slash TV swivel mount and that serves as a divider between our
03:49two bases the dining room and our bedroom. So I need to find a lighting solution for
03:55the bedroom area because it was a little dark in here. I already had a bull head
04:00that I attached to my wall as kind of art and decided to stick a light bulb kind of
04:05in its mouth area to make it into a sconce. Every time Dean looks at it he
04:09says it looks a little demonic but I think it was smart and cute. What do you
04:12think? Leave it in the comments. One of the hardest things about living in such a
04:17small space with another person is if you have a disagreement you have nowhere to
04:21go. So kind of a little unspoken thing that Dean and I do is when we have a
04:26little argument he goes into the dining area I stay in the bed and it's probably
04:30the only two spaces in the house where you can't see each other so until we
04:35cool off a little bit that's where we stay. Dean and I met at a party called
04:39Colors a little over three years ago. It was the last couple minutes of the party
04:43the last call and he asked to buy me a drink and I told him I wanted a water. We
04:47ended up talking for the rest of the night exchanged numbers and we've been
04:51inseparable ever since. This is a closet that Dean and I share. So I've worked in
04:56fashion and eyewear for the last five six years. I currently work at Trina Turk and
05:02I've worked there for about a year and three months and I love it. My last place
05:07was a loft with two walk-in closets so I know you can imagine downsizing to one
05:12closet and then sharing it was difficult but I think that the pieces I kept
05:16were the pieces I actually wear all the time so I don't really mind it as much.
05:20One decision we made was to take the sliding doors off. You know that little
05:23middle part that you can never get to we couldn't afford to lose that space so by
05:27taking the doors off we actually ended up fitting more in there. The one door in
05:31the house leads to our bathroom. So the first thing I realized when I got to the
05:35bathroom area of this place was that the sink wasn't even inside the bathroom.
05:38It's actually directly across from the closet but by having the sink on the
05:42outside of the bathroom it allows us to both get ready at the same time. I
05:45mentioned I had a long list of must-haves and one of them was a clawfoot tub
05:49and instead I got this. I guess it works for the purpose of getting ready but I
05:54really want a nice beautiful clawfoot that I can light candles. Yeah I'm wishful
05:58thinking. After Dean and I get married next April we're hoping to upsize a little
06:02bit and this time I'm not gonna have a long list of wants I just want a door.
06:06When I first moved in and bought this place it was just for myself so when Dean
06:11moved in to downsize my stuff even more than I already had was a task but sharing it
06:17with Dean solidifying our relationship it ended up being the best choice in the end.
06:27Thanks so much for watching My Sweet Digs. To subscribe click here. To watch more
06:31videos click here.
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