What $3,350 gets you In GreenPoint, Brooklyn | NYC Apartment Tours (loft)

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

Square one for the third time. Hate to say I'm surprised. Hi. Hello. How's it going? It's Elena. Bring you guys another New York City apartment tour on a little series on my channel I like to call Buzzed in where I basically show off people's badass apartments around the city. In the past, I've gone to friends apartments and kind of just talk about their decor, how they decorate in a small apartment, and also kind of talk about what their neighborhood is like. So, in case you're interested in living in New York City, you get to see a little bit about what it's like.

Maybe one day I can bring it to other cities, states, maybe even countries a girl can dream. Fingers are crossed. But today, I'm super excited cuz we're heading to Greenpoint in Brooklyn to see Jess. And I actually found Jess on TikTok of all places. She popped up on my for you page and her apartment is so stunning. Some of you guys might have seen it on Tik Tok. It's unbelievable. So, I very promptly slid into her DMs and was like, "Hey, can I come film your apartment?" And thankfully, she said yes.

So, I'm so stoked to go and meet her to go and hang out in Greenpoint. Like I said, Greenpoint's in Brooklyn. It's a very cute and quaint neighborhood. There's a lot of great vintage shopping. A brief history lesson on it. In the 1880s, there was a lot of Polish, Spanish, and some Italian immigrants who kind of settled within this Greenpoint area. And then especially after World War II kind of became known as Little Poland because of the Polish population there. And the name Greenpoint comes from the fact that Greenpoint is basically like on this tip of Brooklyn.

It used to be covered in a bunch of trees, so they named it Greenpoint. Also, I'm super excited cuz we have a sponsor for this video. Today's sponsor is Visible, which if you haven't heard of it, you're missing out. It is an all digital phone service that basically has everything you need and nothing you don't need. If you're looking to save more money each month or maybe you're on your parents phone plan and it's time for you to get on your own phone plan, like this is such a great service.

It's only $40 a month for unlimited everything. All powered by Verizon with 5G included. Visible offers straightforward wireless service on a reliable network. There's no contracts, no hidden fees, no phone storage, so you don't have to deal with anything like that. Visible is super affordable. You've got limited minutes, messages, mobile hotspots. You can even get your monthly bill even lower by using their party play feature where you basically can split the bill with a friend, a stranger, and lower your cost to as low as $25 a month when you have four plus people on this party play feature.

What's great is you don't even have to change your phone number. If you have an eSIM capable device, you can basically bring it to Visible, try it out with your phone number, see if you like it. I feel like Visible is a great way to kind of just have one less worry when it comes to your monthly payments and save a little bit of money. Obviously, New York City rent is so expensive. And if you can find ways to cut costs, like lowering your phone bill. I think that is just a great way to go.

So, again, thanks so much to Visible for sponsoring this video. I love them. I worked with them in the past. You can check them out down below. Enough chitchat for me. Let's head on over to Brooklyn and go see Jess's apartment. Hi, welcome to my apartment. My name is Jess. I am originally from Australia, but I've lived here for 6 and 1/2 years. I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a loft with my partner, James, and my dog, Ghost. My partner and I pay $3,350, which I think is a steal. This is the dining room.

So, this is actually reclaimed wood and I got it from a pregnant lady in Dumbo. And the whole thing, including the benches and this is like a custom table, was $300, which is pretty cheap, so I'm pretty proud of that. These are all gifts. So, these are actually my favorite salt and pepper shakers. They're two just really curvy women. And my business partner who owns the consistency project like sourced these specifically cuz she knew I would love them which she was correct about. So then this is a wall of NASA posters.

So they commissioned a bunch of artists to imagine what future tourism posters would look like for outer space. So each poster is designed by a different artist and you can actually print these out for free and then you just print them out and frame them yourself. So the whole thing probably cost me like $50 for the frames alone. That's it. This is a misque pantry area. We moved in and the space was really unusual. It's kind of interesting because it's all open cube shelving and this apartment is like just living in organized chaos all the time which I've fully grown into.

Um, this is my boyfriend's O Garden, which is an indoor like herb growing plant machine from Kickstarter that didn't deliver for 2 years and then by the time they delivered there was no customer service, but it looks really cool and we get really great basil. That is so incredible. So random. So random. It doesn't exist anymore. They went bankrupt. When you told me I was like, "This is huge." What? It does look very cool though. So, you know, it works out. But it is large. This was already here. This chalkboard.

So, we decided when we had a housewarming 2 years ago that we would just ask friends who came over to leave a little mark. It's a nice reminder of all the people who have kind of come and gone here. This is the kitchen. Again, a lot of open shelving, everything. These were already installed. Living in a loft, obviously, it's really nice, but the kitchen and the bathroom is kind of not the reason you move in here. So, our sinks are kind of terrible. Like, we are collecting ceiling juice because the roof is not repaired.

So, that's another part. Um, and the stove is pretty old, but it gets the job done. Then we're walking this way, and this is the bedroom. It's a small room, so we've just kind of kept it very simple. There's a bed, lots of pillows. I think this is a little cheesy, but I actually quite like waking up to this. They're just little film images of things that have happened throughout the last 7 years I've lived here. This is the storage space. It's this gigantic IKEA closet. and my partner and I kind of share all the dressing and storage space.

This is my clothing rack. It's terrible for my boyfriend cuz he works right here and so every time he works he's just got like all these weird clothes next to him and then we just have a lot of plants everywhere as you can see. So this is my dressing room. I've kind of filled it with things that feel like me, which is very Gemini and just all over the place. So, this is actually the artist that did this tattoo for me in Berlin. And then I actually bought this two copies of this for my best friend who lives in Berlin as well.

So, she has one hanging in her apartment in Berlin. This I got from Facebook Marketplace. I think it was $50, but I just am such an anxious and frantic person. This is really helpful for me to like remember to relax. We went to Sag Harbor. My friend picked this rock out for me and it just she said she liked it because it's made out of so many composite parts. Um, and it's just like all these different interesting things, but they come together and they're still super solid, which I really love that she said about me.

This is another cube area. So, this is a vintage bar cut. We saw a red panda exhibit for my birthday and we got I got to feed them. So, we brought this back. Oh, these boots are my Burning Man boots. I just think they're the most outrageous boots ever. And you can still see like how dusty they are a little bit. So, I just leave it there as a nice reminder of what a magical place that is. This actually used to be a ladder that went up, but our dog couldn't access it.

So, these are our own stairs that we built, which I think is really cool. Saturday in the bathroom. So, this is the living room. Um, it's an elevated loft area. Before we moved in, the artist who lived here, this was her painting studio. Um, but we really wanted to put a lot of the kind of seating furniture in here because the light comes directly onto this level. So, we both love plants and we just really wanted to have a space where we could fill it with plants and with life, especially during a pandemic.

It has been super helpful to feel like you're outside while you're inside. Everything that I buy, I try to buy secondhand. It's a pretty big value of mine. I don't think that we necessarily need to buy more things. There's enough that exists already. The hunt as well is thrill for me. I'm just really proud of the fact that I've furnished, I would say, 90% of this apartment with secondhand objects or furniture from different places. This is our entire wall of plants in Little Forest. It's also just like a really nice ritual to be able to come around and say hi to everyone and get to water them.

I think being able to connect with taking care of something that requires serious effort sometimes has been such a rewarding experience and takes you out of just the enu of being in front of a screen all day. On this side, this is my meditation corner, the propagation station. A lot of different plants, some of them in need of rehab. This guy is also just like a 1940s some sort of lantern that I got also from Fenway. I love a lot of the little strange things they have in there. This is all my books.

Um, my friend Serita painted this. A friend I know, Hannah, took this photo and was raising money during the pandemic. So, I got that kangaroo because we're Australian. It's a little piece of home. I just love having photos up. It makes me feel kind of like a million years old, but I love taking film photos, too. So, my dog's paw imprint on my friend's lap when we were upstate and it's just like I think it's such a beautiful photo that evokes such emotion for me. So, I love having these little like pieces of my own like life and art on the walls.

This is the tiny not very interesting bathroom. Like I said, living in a loft, it's not as glamorous as a lot of people make it out to be. It's a beautiful space, but it's not a super well-maintained or luxury building, but there's not much to work with. Then up here is the weird little hideaway stairs to the second lofted living room. Now, we've converted this into a like tiny TV room because we moved the TV from that space and just decided to have it small here. And I also come up here to do therapy or to try to be by myself because this gives you some semblance of privacy.

So, we installed these curtains that you can pull and this already had these sliding doors so you can completely enclose yourself. That uh print is from a brand called Boot Boy Biz. They design each collection of street wear based on some sort of theory or idea in culture and they break down a lot of different cultural references and create designs out of it. The whole entire theory of that collection was around social condensers and spaces where people could gather like public baths and all these types of things throughout history and the use of communal spaces which is something that I really care about and one of the reasons I love living in New York.

I'm Vietnamese. There was a campaign where they collaborated with artists to create prints of their favorite restaurants. So, the proceeds would go to them and it's down the road in Greenpoint and they're just one of my favorite restaurants that do Vietnamese food really well. I am a founder of a boutique marketing agency called Scallion Pancake. Um, we represent purposedriven and bipok founded brands and we do everything from influencer marketing to social media marketing, community partnerships, etc. I also am a photographer and I also do creative for a vintage store here called the consistency project.

My interior style is organized chaos and too many plants. I also tend to like a lot of things and I have a lot of passion for objects. So, it just tends to be a lot more than I actually need. So, definitely just cluttered in a really pleasant zen way. Something that I've really valued about all the things that surround me is that everything has some sort of story. It feels really nice to build a home out of your memories and to feel like you've curated all the best parts of yourself that you want to celebrate into one space that you can share with friends.

It's just such a beautiful neighborhood. I have a dog. Before the pandemic, we used to go to the dog park every day and there were, you know, 50 60 dog owners that were there every single morning. So, you develop pretty strong friendships and it's pretty amazing for me to know neighbors all over the place, especially during a pandemic when you feel so isolated walking out the door and having so many friendly faces nod to you. Whether that's the person I know at the dog park or you know the Polish woman at Eurochemist, which is my chemist who are they're the best.

Or Kubu's photo service, the Polish run photography redevelopment. I know the person at the grocery store. I know the old man that sits on the stoop and yells at people every day. There is a sense of home of coming home that you don't get I think in a lot of neighborhoods and Greenpoint is a bit farther away and there's still so much presence of different types of people here. You know, being part of a gentrification problem is something that comes up for me and something that I think about especially with, you know, my value system and the way that I live my life normally.

I also come from a background where my parents were refugees. So, I also kind of understand what it's like to only have certain places that you can live. Gentrification is and has been a part of developing cities. There are ways that cities develop and I don't think that I have an answer and I'd love to know more and I want to learn more about this problem. I think obviously gentrification is a thing that happens in every part of New York and it's up to us to have conversations about what that means.

I love vintage and have been shopping vintage since I was 12 when it was a necessity. Obviously love Beacon's Closet. 90% of my wardrobe is from Beacon's Closet, one block away, so hard to avoid it. And then otherwise Fang's Way across the road is quite good. They have a lot of plants and more boho like eclectic furniture. Dobin Street Co-op is around the corner. Really love them. They're affordable as well. And then there's Dream Fishing Tackle. She's super super lovely. She shares it with her dad and he runs a bait and tackle shop at the back.

Awoke, obviously. Seven Wonders as well is quite nice. What don't I love about New York? I love so many things, but the number one thing for me that attracts me and keeps me here is the melting pot of all different types of people from all walks of life. The fact that I can be friends with someone who is, you know, 20 years older than me that I met at the dog park and has no correlating interests to, you know, a bunch of Asian girls that I go Asian clubbing with is just the spiciest part of life.

And I learn a lot from being exposed to other people. And I really value having different perspectives in my life and not just one viewpoint. And I think that is what's really special that you can meet anyone you want. You can be whoever you want when you come here. You really come here to make real whatever dream it is whether it's about your identity or your career or your friendships. And I think it's just such a high octane city in a way that everyone appears here really purposefully for the most part.

And it's all different backgrounds. Nowhere else that gives you that diversity and breadth of humanity.