Tag: The Owner: | Apartment Therapy

AIA launches How Design Works

Design Process 101. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has launched a new site, How Design Works to reach the growing number of people designing/redesigning their homes. The site aims to ans...

The Owner: How to Make $139,000 in 9 Months

(Note: Tim will be working the summer theater circuit this summer and posting irregularly but not unquirkily. We suggested he write about what a New Yorker feels when displaced to hotel rooms across ...

The Owner: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

The idea started innocently enough: I thought it would be good to know my neighbors. Leaving my last apartment after five years, it had felt odd that I only knew one neighbor’s name - and that was ...

The Owner: Roach-a-Phobia

For some people, it’s spiders. For others, snakes. For me, it’s cockroaches. Last night, I googled “cockroach” and “phobia” but couldn’t find a formal name, though I’m sure it exists. To the untra...

The Owner: Ghosts of The Past

The week before I moved out of my old apartment, where I’d lived for almost five years, a neighbor stopped me in the hall and ominously whispered, “Did anyone ever tell you what happened in that apart...

The Owner: "Leaving my baby with a sitter for the first time."

I recently got an offer to dance in a California production of West Side Story this July, and an actor friend suggested that I sublet my apartment for the time away. Considering my own West Side Stor...

The Owner: Fighting Bigger is Better

When I started to seriously consider buying an apartment, I was esentially living in an expensive coffin: a 300 square foot studio with a brick wall view. I boiled my Future Apartment Wish List down...

The Owner: Temperature Control, New York Style

On a recent below-freezing day, an out-of-town friend and I had a giggling fit over the fact that my air conditioner was on, turned up to full blast. With steam pipes in my kitchen, bathroom and livi...

The Owner: "More desperate for a doorman than for a boyfriend"

Don’t tell my agent, but sometimes it’s good to be an unemployed actor. During the last month of kitchen renovations, I have probably spent a total of 40 hours sitting in my apartment, waiting for co...

The Owner: "You don't tap-dance, do you?"

Coming to the city, I had heard so many board interview horror stories (“They turned down Lauren Bacall!”), that for my own board interview last summer, I felt like I was auditioning for an all-or-not...

The Owner: Sticker Shock or $10,000 Is Pocket Change (to others)

I bought my apartment last September knowing that the first thing to go would be the kitchen. Actually, it was hardly a kitchen. "Kitchen" is only the term I used to loosely describe the run-down ca...

The Owner: 212 Snobs Take Note

Bulletin to Manhattanites: I have been to Brooklyn and seen the light. 230 Jay Street was my third stop on The Average NYC Nest Quest ($320K), and my first outside of Manhattan. What a difference a ...

The Owner: Learning To Live with It

“Their floor is your ceiling,” my super said, “so learn to live with it.” In my last building, my upstairs neighbors kept 15 caged pigeons... in their kitchen. The cooing kept me up at night. It ...

The Owner: Plaster Box, But a Good Feeling

More like it: my second look at an “averagely priced” NYC home ($325K here) revealed a lovely, 500 sq-ft. co-op at Riverside & 93rd. I loved the brick fire-place, reminding me of my salmon-brick chi...

The Owner: A Blood Red Room with a View

If you like wall-to-wall blood-red carpeting, have I got the home for you. Forget beginner’s luck: my first visit to an “averagely priced” New York City apartment ($320K according to Frommer’s) was a...

The Owner: Tim Goes Hunting Wabbits

According to Frommer’s “Cities Ranked & Rated”, 10 million coffee-gulping, yoga-posing, Gates-gawking folks call New York home these days. Compared to the national average of $160,000, the median ho...

The Owner: Why Can't I Get My Name on the Door?

This post is by a new reporter, Tim Federle, who is experiencing the joys of ownership for the first time. Only in New York can I brag about the great deal I scored on a quarter of a million dollar ap...