Hello New York City! (Update: One Month In!)
Wow, what a month! We officially landed in New York on June 1, around 1am, greeted at JFK by a waiting line for taxis about 200 people deep. We crossed the threshold of our apartment about 2 hours later, and crashed on our air mattress. Welcome to the greatest city in the world! The following morning we started the battle with our moving company over the arrival date of our truck and all our belongings, and I started working out of Manhattan's finest coffee shops (ok, I might not have been in the finest, but I did see some celebrities in my travels!). Two full weeks, and about thirty $5 lattes later, our moving truck finally arrived, and we spent 36 full hours unpacking and getting settled. We were determined to just get it over with so we could start to feel "at home". Since then, life has been a bit of a whirlwind--lots of catching up with family and friends here on the East Coast, a fantastic 4th of July fireworks show from our roof, and a brand new City with lots to get used to.
Running a business out of my home has always had its ups and downs, but never have I felt the highs and lows more than in our new setting. HOLY MOLY its amazing to be able to take a 10am NYC dance class (which I only just started this week!) without "missing" work. And my new studio.. ahhhh, we'll get to that in a minute. In New York City, everything is right at my fingertips, and yet it's not. Shipping packages has been my biggest challenge (Picture me walking down 42nd street with a thirty pound, two foot high stack of packages during rush hour. Because that happened two weeks ago.) BUT, the Post Office at Penn Station is open until 10PM! What?! I'm an East Coast girl, so the pace of life here doesn't shock me. It's actually refreshing and feels a lot more like home than the Midwest did (sorry, STL!) In general, we're absolutely loving it, and are so excited to get comfortable enough to really call it home.
More photos of the apartment will come soon, but since this is my KEEvents blog, I'll start with my studio/home office/(guest room).
The room is, for the most part, the same set up as my office in St Louis. But the room has more wall space, and is slightly bigger, and somehow it just all works so much better. The desk that Anthony made me folds up and has it's place against the wall for when we have guests (a much more frequent occurrence in NYC!) There is a ton of natural light from the floor to ceiling window, and the closet is a dream.
In St Louis, we had a bunch of built-in drawers and shelves in a small hallway off my office that I used for supply storage. Before the move, I went through all those "catch-all" spots and decided to come up with some more mobile storage solutions. I hit up the Container Store and organized all my supplies, and then purchased some new cabinets and shelving to house it all. Doing all this before the move was HUGE. I can't even imagine trying to figure all that out in our new space, especially after waiting two weeks for everything to arrive. I was able to unpack the neatly packed bins and boxes and set up the entire office in under an hour!
The view isn't exactly spectacular (we're on the 6th floor) but I can see the Hudson River and the sunset from my window.
My plant is SO happy in that window, and the ledge is perfect for temporary storage when we flip the room for guests!
The accordion doors on the closet is the perfect spot for a small display of my favorite projects. I still have a lot of friends and family who don't really understand what I do for a living, so I like to have a display up that's easy to point to and say, "this is what I do!"
I love my new studio and our new apartment, and I've loved setting it up and making it feel like home. I'll share some more photos of the whole thing, just as soon as I get a chance to vacuum and take some photos!
Do you (or did you) live in New York? Where/what do we have to do? What's your favorite part of living in the big city?
More updates to come as we take this new adventure by the horns!