Name: My NYC Apartment Tour: $1,875/Month in Manhattan
Uploaded: 2024-07-17T17:45:35.000Z
Duration: 15 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello, welcome to my New York City apartment.

All right, so some quick specs on the place before we get into it.

Adverbs of manner

This is technically a large one bedroom apartment.

However, my roommate and I put in a flex wall to make it a two bedroom apartment.

First thing, right off of the entryway, we have this very large communal closet.

My roommate is actually out of town, so it's empty right now, but that's the first closet and it's a big one.

Next little thing that we have here is this table.

So we're all about functionality in this household.

This one actually, I'm not going to do it right now, but it doubles in size, if you will.

We move this into the kitchen if we have extra people over to play drinking games, you know, things that kids get up to.

So that's what we have here, but most of the time we just kind of leave it as an entryway table.

We have our keys here, little decorations that are definitely always there.

Moving into the living space, we have this futon.

Like I said, we're all about functionality in this house, so this folds out to be twice the size.

Moving into the kitchen, I actually really like this kitchen.

These are all, as you can see, we have pots and pans.

These are all soft closed doors, so you don't hear a thing.

Lots and lots of storage, and they go up really high.

We have gas burning stoves, which I'm personally a fan of.

In college, I did have some electric ones and they were not as good.

Large refrigerator, or I don't know if it's large, it's a normal size refrigerator.

Normal size refrigerator, freezer, oven, and then something that is not in every New York

We have these ottomans, which actually can hold, I think it was up to 50 pounds.

No, 140, because I could stand on them, so.

140 pounds, and we use them as step stools a lot of the time.

They also double as kind of storage bins, so once again, functionality.

And back to the flex wall, this is something that we constructed on our own.

It took some doing, but it is how we're able to make this into a two-bedroom instead of a really large one-bedroom.

All right, I get a lot of questions about my flex wall.

The first one is called a pressurized wall, which are ones that go all the way up to the ceiling and it basically looks like the room was meant to be there and that it was built into the apartment in the first place.

These are still installed without screws or nails, though, so in theory, it will not leave a mark on the walls when you take it down.

Second, there are partial walls, which are very similar to pressurized walls in that they're installed without screws and nails, but they don't go all the way to the ceiling.

They'll come short about a foot or something like that.

So it's not the best option for privacy purposes, but there are still a ton of use cases for partial walls.

And then the third are bookshelf walls, which as the name suggests, are not really walls at all, but rather freestanding bookshelves that help create some separation and sound insulation for a new partitioned-off portion of your apartment.

Now, what my roommate and I did was sort of a mixture of these, and it was especially tricky for us because our apartment has 12-foot ceilings.

So we have freestanding bookshelves as a large part of the wall, but then two-by-fours going all the way up to the ceiling, plus some L brackets down on the ground to give the bookshelf some stability.

Additionally, we have some of that pinkish-purple foam core material that you guys saw, which helps add some soundproofing.

And even in between the foam and the walls, we added this cushiony-type material to try to help with the soundproofing as well.

In other words, we MacGyver the shit out of this wall, if you will, and in hindsight, we would have gladly paid $1,000, $2,000 for someone to come install it instead, but it was an adventure.

So are these flex walls legal in New York City?

A lot of it is actually building-specific.

To install a pressurized wall, your landlord will have to obtain the proper permits and a new certificate of occupancy from the New York City Department of Buildings for safety reasons.

In any case, I think your best plan of action is to ask your landlord or be transparent ahead of time if you have plans to do something like this and confirm that it will be okay.

My roommate and I confirmed with our leasing agent before signing for this apartment if it was okay to put up this sort of bookshelf flex wall to make this apartment into a two-bedroom flex.

And we wouldn't have signed the lease otherwise.

In conclusion, even though it can be quite the undertaking to construct a flex wall yourself or a fairly hefty upfront fee to have someone come and install it, anywhere from $850 to $2,000 depending on the type of wall, I think flex walls are an amazing way to save a lot of money on rent living somewhere like New York City.

This is not mine, this is my roommate's, but like I said, she's out of town, so it's a little empty right now.

And by a little empty, I mean completely empty.

And by out of town, I mean that she was in between jobs and traveled for three months while I lived with an amazing subletter.

And I filmed this on the very day that the subletter moved out, right before my roommate moved back in.

So obviously we compromised a little bit on having a smaller living area in order to have this other large bedroom.

So this is what the flex wall looked like beforehand, before we put that white sheet on out there.

It's kind of this pinky color, it's foam, so it actually helps with the sound a little bit.

But you know, torture chamber vibes a little bit.

Because this was originally the living space, there's not a built-in closet in this room.

So that's kind of why we wanted to use bookshelves or bookcases as the wall, lots of storage there.

And then the view here is amazing as well.

It's actually on a corner, just like my bedroom.

I like the way the building is kind of cut L's, you know what I mean?

Anyway, that's actually my bedroom right across the way, and we're going to go take a look.

Here in the hallway, we have one of New York City's biggest luxury amenities, laundry in unit.

Like I said, that is really not the case for New York City in a lot of apartments, so it's very nice to have.

Next, we have this other large closet in the hallway.

It's the one that my roommate uses because, like I said, that second bedroom, which was originally the living space, does not have a built-in closet.

All of these are so tall, like they go all the way up there.

Moving along into the bathroom, this is the bathroom.

For those who are curious, no, we do not shower with it open.

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My NYC Apartment Tour: $1,875/Month in Manhattan

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