00:00Hi everyone, my name is Anne. And I'm Ryan. And welcome to our Rent-Controlled Sweet Dicks. Come on in.
00:05So we live in the East Village with our cat, Jordy, and we pay $2,500 a month,
00:09which we think is a really good price because it's rent-controlled,
00:12so we're paying a couple hundred bucks below market price, and we know that our rent wouldn't increase dramatically in
00:18the next few years.
00:18One thing that we loved about this apartment was the sheer size of it.
00:21We saw a couple apartments in the East Village where I wasn't able to sit on the toilet, so that
00:26was a non-starter.
00:27This is our kitchen. We love to eat, so we love to cook.
00:30Our favorite thing that we made so far was an ossobuco that we had for our dinner party last week.
00:35Our breakfast nook is really nice because it gets a lot of natural light since it faces the south.
00:39And it's also a nice place to slow down and eat breakfast together when we can.
00:43This is our bathroom. This is where we keep most of our plants and flowers because Jordy, our cat, likes
00:48to eat them,
00:49and he doesn't really have access to the bathroom.
00:51I made some hanging baskets because I needed extra storage space for all of my stuff,
00:55and I just nailed them into the wall. It's not super secure, but hopefully it stays there.
01:00Craft is sort of my outlet for staying sane because my job is in technology, which I love,
01:05but I stay at a computer all day.
01:06There's our dining area.
01:08Having a separate dining space is really great.
01:10At our last apartment, there's really no separation between the kitchen and the living room,
01:15so it's nice to have a place that Anne and I can eat together at home.
01:19We have people over for dinner. A lot of times we get takeouts, but we recently hosted a big holiday
01:25dinner for 10, 12 people,
01:27and that was really nice.
01:28My mom got this hammock for me from Vietnam a couple of years ago.
01:31Anne was like, yeah, it's really sturdy. It's really good.
01:33And then I sat down in it, and I weigh a lot more than Anne, obviously, and the whole thing
01:39came coming down.
01:40And then I put it back up in the stud, and then the next time my friend sat in and
01:44it came down,
01:45we made sure to use a stud finder the third time to make sure it doesn't come down anymore.
01:49I'll sit in it sometimes. Ryan refuses to go anywhere near it.
01:54This is our bedroom. We put the bedroom in the middle between the dining room and the living room
02:00because one of the main goals of having a bigger place was to have more people over.
02:03So we wanted a bigger living room than we had a bedroom.
02:06Being in the middle room, we don't have a lot of air when we sleep, so we have to keep
02:09this door open
02:10or else it gets too hot in this room.
02:12If someone sleeps over, we can see directly at them.
02:15And we say hi, say goodnight. It's nice. It's like an adult summer party.
02:19And then also because it's an air mattress and it naturally deflates,
02:24sometimes we'll see them end up tilted with their leg in the back and in the air.
02:29And then we have to reinflate it for them because they were too kind not to do it while we
02:33were sleeping.
02:35And there's our living room.
02:37The most sentimental thing in the apartment is our photo up there.
02:40One of our best friends visited from Brazil and took that picture of us.
02:44I just think it's such a romantic picture.
02:47We're in love. We're in love with the city, with our life here.
02:51It just looks like a scene from a movie, like with the sunset and the skyline.
02:54And I think that we'll treasure it everywhere we go.
02:57This couch was probably one of the greatest steal in the entire apartment.
03:01I bought it secondhand from someone for $100.
03:04I think it's because it's so low. It's really comfy.
03:06Yeah, he kind of just went to melt into it.
03:08My dad and I went to Jersey to pick it up.
03:10And the guy actually told us it was like his first couch when he bought when he moved out.
03:14And he bought it from Chinatown. So we're glad that it's back in Lower Manhattan.
03:18The style of our apartment is influenced by our travels.
03:20The most evident part of it is that it's very colorful.
03:23The rug was the biggest steal I think we got from our recent trip to Sevilla.
03:27We found this rug was for 50 euros, which is a steal because it's from Morocco.
03:32We were able to fold up the rug and stuff it in our carry-on luggage.
03:36We didn't know how it would go with the rest of the apartment, but...
03:39It worked out.
03:40Yeah, it worked out.
03:40We met in statistics class in Boston University.
03:44And the teacher said,
03:46OK, now everyone look into your book and answer this question.
03:48I looked over and saw that she didn't have a book and I smiled.
03:52And then I saw her immediately look around her to see if anyone else was free and could work with
03:57her.
03:58I was very reluctant because I'm not a morning person at all.
04:01Even though there was an 11 a.m. class.
04:02She ended up having to work with me and we ended up talking the whole time.
04:05We became really good friends who had crushes on each other.
04:09And even wrote letters to each other when we were away for the summer.
04:13And then we came back and we started dating.
04:15The hardest part to deal with at first was how slanted the apartment is.
04:18Before we got the blocks to put on the end of the bed, we could actually feel like we were
04:22rolling over in the bed when we were sleeping, which wasn't great.
04:25One of my favorite things about the apartment is that we can see the Empire State Building from our living
04:30room.
04:30And we can see the World Trade Center from our kitchen.
04:33And I love that we have so much space so Jordy can run around more.
04:36We think this is the best place that we've lived because we have a lot of space for people to
04:40come over,
04:40which is the main reason why we moved to this bigger apartment.
04:43And I think a home is as much the memories that you create in it as the physical stuff that's
04:47in it.
04:48And we're at a point in life where our friends can still come over at a moment's notice and just
04:52hang out.
04:53It just brings us a lot of joy to have people over.
04:55And all of the stuff in it just makes us happy, even the littlest things.
04:58We'll see you next time.
