To recap: this is what my now-beloved apartment looked like when we first found it: spiffed-up by 1989's finest decor and then never touched again. See this post for the first floor. Spoiler alert: it had a lot of mirrors. So many mirrors.
well, that resolution quality is a nightmare. but LOOK HOW ROUND THE WALL.
Onward!! Upstairs, the fun continued with a bathroom identical to the first, down to the artificially low ceilings. When we did construction, we discovered that they had been dropped 18" to hide a single pipe. This, in an apartment where one of the main legit design elements was exposed pipes. Same barf tiles, same sink for children. It's not even worth reposting the photo.
this is where the magic happens.
The bedroom area suggested strongly that you invest in a heart-shaped bed. To echo the platform downstairs, the bed area had also been built up. But since the ceilings here were normal height, it could only be 12" up. So, one and a half steps. Round wall with crenellations, however? Check!
i feel like this is where the cool-guy villain from a john hughes movie had his morning coffee while his one-night-stand slunk off to the shower, consumed with self-loathing. i had a very rich backstory for that bench.
The bed platform put the window almost on the floor, since the window was installed at a normal height for its normal ceilings.
And the edge of this bed-pit we had another U-shaped built-in banquette for a table. Not a space for a dresser or a chair, mind you - a breakfast table. Or… a poker table? I was unclear. The walk-in closet had been built out with another rounded wall, but of course it did not touch the ceiling.
lest you be fooled, that fencing only went 1/3 of the way around the deck. juuuuust enough for the realtor's photo.
The roof deck was the one thing that was relatively normal, since it was just a deck. The wood was old, but the building was in charge of replacing it. It looked great when it was done, and we got to keep the big-ass, very nice grill that was obviously too heavy to ever ever ever move off the roof. The owner insisted on my giving her an $80 check for it at the closing. I really should have called her bluff and said 'No, no, please. It's yours. Take it over the railing and down the 4 flights of steps!' It was just so silly - after all those hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sale of a home, to insist on an $80 check. But it was a little bit funny, and hey, $80 grill.
We also inherited the 45 broken flower pots, many of which were in a lovely rotten-fake-wine-barrel style, with a bizarrely high plastic-bits-of-broken-unidentified-things soil content, which this $80 was supposed to ensure were removed. Whatever. Grill!
So this, friends, was my love. Closed in mid-December, demo started in mid-January, and we moved in on April 15th. Before that, however, we had a killer 80s New Years party, lit by christmas lights that had only begun working that morning, when I managed to get ConEd to turn the electricity back on.
The check made out to ConEd from the closing was $18,000 in unpaid bills from the previous owner. BONKERS.
Next up: the renovation.