...and to get drunker. Once you surpass a certain number of drinks, Guitar Hero will no longer satisfy your urge to drunkenly sing along with songs you love and you invariably end up deciding that you should go sing KARAOKE!
When I got back to our apartment that night, I found that the installation of the new spiral staircase that they started working on on the very first day of October had been completed! Our apartment and the apartment below us...
On Thursday afternoon we came home and found a giant hole cut into the middle of our living room! Construction to turn our apartment and the one below into a giant duplex by adding a spiral staircase had begun!
When we got back to our apartment, we found that the floor in our living room had been marked up to be opened up! Our landlord's taxes turned out to be way higher than he expected, so he needed to turn our apartment and the one below us into one uber-apartment in order to reduce the number of occupancies in the building! We debated trying to find people to share our new duplex with, but in the end we decided to just find a new apartment. Sad!
Then after that, we headed back to our apartment to get settled back in! 35 days and 900 photos later, it was great to be back in our good ol' New York City apartment. Home sweet home, indeed!
If you live in NYC, you're in luck. No matter what your apartment looks like or what neighborhood it's in, I guarantee you that there's someone trustworthy out there that is totally dying to sublet your apartment.
Ok, now that the job stuff is all taken care of, now it's time to figure out how you can minimize the cost of your vacation. When I did this, only 10 of the 20 days I was taking off were paid-vacation, so I really needed to figure out a way to minimize the impact of not getting paid for 10 days of work. The answer? Find someone who's willing to sublet your apartment for a month and who's willing to more than your rent!
After I squared away my work stuff, I came home, snapped these pics of our 1 BR East Village Apartment, and threw a listing up on Craigslist detailing the amenities (Manhattan, tree-lined street, nice neighborhood with fun restaurants and bar, a bike to use as you please, cable TV, an Xbox 360 with a shit-ton of games, etc, etc)....
Since we had to clean our entire apartment for our sub-letters, we decided to get it good and dirty first by inviting a bunch of a friends to come over and get real drunk and rowdy.
Later that night a whole bunch of people came over to hang and play Cranium! L to R: Josh, Posh, Niki, Amanda, Quinn, Faran, Rosie, Murdo and Ellen with her arms full of dogs!
It was a Monday night, so by 3am the party had pretty much cleared out except for a few stragglers. One of whom was the guy sitting on the left who'd brought his dog along! (I think he's one of Meredith's friends from grad school)
Here's a view of our living room from the kitchen after we'd finished unloading the truck! Again, I gotta give a super-huge thanks to KT and Siege who helped us schlep stuff for hours and stuck it out until the bitter end!
...we headed over to our new apartment and began the LONG and tedious process of unloading ALL of our stuff! Our new apartment was the entire first floor of this building!
Reverse angle. Pretty sweet place, right? We had anticipated that it would take forever to find an apartment that we both loved, but we lucked out and this was the very first place we saw! Score!
Here are a bunch of pics I took a few months later after we'd gotten all settled in that give a much better idea of just how rad this apartment was. (Meredith and I were only there for a little over a year. The landlord ended up getting hit with way more real estate taxes than he'd planned on and found out he could get a tax break by reducing the number of apartments in the building. So he eventually ended up putting a spiral staircase in the middle of our living room and turning our apartment and the entire apartment below into a huge duplex. He gave us the option of staying, but in the end we decided to get a new place rather than finding another couple that we wanted to share a duplex with. Boo!) Anyway, here's a pic of the living room taken from the kitchen.
