Apartment Tour: A Nurse and Content Creator’s Dream Apartment Transformation in Long Island City

When nurse, mom, wife, and content creator Emily Auffrey moved to Queens in New York City in 2014, she dreamed of renting the Long Island City apartment she lives in today. She witnessed the brand-new building’s opening in 2015, but assumed it was a luxury apartment out of reach due to famously high NYC rent prices. “I was like, who lives here?” she says. “Do millionaires live here or something?” Little did she know, soon her NYC apartment hunting dream would come true.

Auffrey entered the building one day to retrieve an item she claimed in her neighborhood Buy Nothing Facebook group. When she met up with the tenant, Auffrey told her how much she loved the building, and received a pleasant surprise in response: “She's like: ‘It's affordable housing,’” Auffrey says. “From then on, I was determined to get into the building.” 

Auffrey was patient; at the time, the initial lottery was closed, as was the waitlist. But after a few years, as NYC renters began to flee the city in the spring of 2020, Auffrey got her chance. “We got called off the waitlist in July of 2020,” she says. She and her husband and their four-year-old son moved into their new apartment — 990 square feet, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a large outside terrace — that November. 

With her bohemian-fusion interior design style already developed and her love for plants burgeoning with each day of lockdown, Auffrey knew what she had to do with her new home, an all-white unit: “I was ready to outfit it and make it my own,” she says. Here’s her NYC apartment tour.

In the living room, one of her favorite elements is the views out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Auffrey says if you look out the windows you can see boats, ferries, seaplanes, and the exact spot where she and her husband got engaged. Because of the windows, the room also gets an impressive amount of natural light — perfect for all Auffrey’s plants.

“I kind of wanted to keep the furniture away from the windows and keep a lot of the focus on the view,” she says. Because of this, and a slightly irregular room shape, she decided to forego buying a TV. But her and her husband’s hobbies — her painting and DIY projects at the dining table and his DJ setup in the same dining nook — keep them entertained and the space filled with sound and color.

Without the would-be focal point of the TV, the flow of the room relies on the furniture Auffrey has curated to bring life to the space, as well as rugs to create separation. She opted for a dining sofa and table over traditional chairs, placing them over a blue circle rug to create a dining nook. Over the table, she’s used one of her favorite renter-friendly DIY items, the nearly invisible adhesive hook (which can bear up to 13 pounds of weight), to hang a charming swag pendant light. 

“I don’t think you’re allowed to drill into the ceiling in a rental, so I always use those hooks to hang my planters, and I have a lot of swag pendant lights I’ll hang from those hooks, too,” she says. Most recently, she used the hooks for strategically placed DIY wall art: “I like to put pictures in unexpected places,” she says. “I have that [flower vase wall art] on a really small sliver of a wall that's in between the kitchen and dining living areas. I think that gives a lot of character.” 

The kitchen in Auffrey’s apartment is on the other side of the breakfast bar. Auffrey loves the galley kitchen because it has a window and a full-size pantry (rare finds for NYC real estate). “It’s next to the kitchen and everything — it’s insane,” she says. 

The kitchen also has a full-size dishwasher and fridge with a pull-out freezer, and plenty of cabinet storage. “It’s open concept, but there’s enough shelves to make it semi-private,” she says, noting that when she’s in the kitchen, she can still see the view out the windows and her son playing on the other side of the breakfast bar.

To make the space her own, she added one of her favorite DIY decoration elements: cafe curtains. “They’re in the window in the kitchen, and I made them from old pillowcases,” she says. No sewing necessary. When it comes to curtains, she says, there’s a specific balance she likes to maintain as a city renter — like the ones in the kitchen, any curtains she buys or makes are sheer. “If I moved to any apartment in New York City, I would probably have sheer curtains,” she says, “just so I could have the light coming in, but also have privacy.”

In Auffrey and her husband’s bedroom, she went for a focus on warmth and coziness. “[The room is] really small, so I just played with the smallness,” she says. The focal point of the room is the bed, which she customized with a tan velvet slipcover over the headboard and a dreamy, sheer canopy from Bed Bath and Beyond. “It brings the ceiling down, like the room is giving you a hug,” she says. 

Above the bed is another swag pendant light that she found on a Buy Nothing Facebook group. She also hung wall sconces that she found being given away in her apartment’s trash room (where she finds many treasures). Auffrey also painted the room in a color called Spanish Lace, a creamy yellow hue that contributes to the warmth of the space and complements the bohemian decorations like wall sconces, a lamp with a hand-painted shade, and sunburst-patterned peel-and-stick wallpaper.  

When it comes to painting rooms in your apartment — she also painted her son’s room pale blue — you’re best off looking at your lease terms to see what rules apply to your unit. For Auffrey, she’ll just have to paint the walls back to the original color when she moves out. 

But for now, she has her painting projects down to a science to save money while achieving the look she wants: “I like to use the clearance paints,” she says. Home improvement stores will have “oops” paints that were never picked up or returned for lack of satisfaction with the color. “You can get them at a really steep discount,” Auffrey says. 

In her son’s room, she likes to make sure the decor can be practical and easily transitioned as he gets older. That’s why she opted for a timeless, pale-blue color for the walls, and focuses on buying elements that are functional and won’t get old. She found her son a desk on Facebook where he can be independent with homework and keeps his clothes in a KALLAX cube shelving unit with more storage on top of the cubes (hidden by a shower curtain). She keeps his stuffed animals in an ottoman in the room, and leaves room under the bed for more storage. “You need a lot of storage in kids’ rooms,” she says. 

When it comes to decorating, the bathrooms are where Auffrey likes to take the most chances. “I always like to try new things in the bathroom because it’s a small space, and if I don’t like it, I can change it,” she says. “So, one of my bathrooms I painted black, and I absolutely love it.” She decorated it with a big canvas tapestry and painted her own half-moon pattern on it. 

There’s no window in the bathroom, so Auffrey used different avenues to promote self care and fresh energy in the space. She added dried lavender for both aromatherapy and, her claim to fame, the “plant feeling,” as well as pampas grass (which requires no light to live) and a hanging planter basket for her soaps. 

Auffrey became fond of cultivating houseplants during the pandemic, when she finally overcame the learning curve that kept her at arm’s length from gardening before that point. Her first plants came from a Facebook marketplace friend (one of the plants, a prickly pear cactus, is still alive), and now she has dozens of plants in each of the rooms in her house and on her outdoor terrace. 

Auffrey likes that plants have seasons just like us, and that they require pruning and maintenance to remain healthy. “There are a lot of life lessons you can learn with plants,” she says. Plus, working an office job in the city and coming home to plants boosts Auffrey’s mood and quality of life. “New York City has a lot of gray — we call it the concrete jungle — so you need to bring that greenery into your space when there's a lot of it lacking around you. It just gives the space life.” 

Although Auffrey doesn’t know how long she’ll stay in their current space in LIC, she enjoys every moment they spend raising their daily, entertaining friends, ushering in new plant life, and making tons of memories along the way. “It really is a dream apartment,” she says. 

For more house tours, check out the rest of our Real Renters section.