At Home With POPSUGAR: How I Completely Renovated My NYC Apartment

Following demolition, the rebuilding began. New walls were constructed, a new ceiling was structured, doorframes were built, and electrical wiring was placed. The 30-year-old electrical panel needed to be replaced to support the load of modern-day appliances, so new wiring was placed throughout the apartment.

While the contractor and his team worked on the structural side of the apartment, we got to have fun picking out the decorative side of things. In an effort to keep costs in line with our budget, we made our selections without the help of a decorator. Was it stressful? Yes. But after years of pinning photos to my Pinterest boards and watching enough HGTV to think the Property Brothers were my friends, I really knew what I wanted for each room. I found that the sales consultants at the tile, bath-fixture, and appliance stores were more than happy to help guide us and help us achieve the designs we were going for in each room. Living in NYC, there are whole neighborhoods dedicated to home design, so we spent many hours browsing those stores and getting opinions from the experts there. In the end, we got our bathroom and kitchen tiles from The Tile Spark and our kitchen and bath fixtures and vanities from The Bath Gallery thanks to all of their industry knowledge.

That said, there were definitely surprises and hard decisions along the way. Who knew there were so many doors to choose from? We picked seven-foot doors (about a foot taller than standard doors) to make the ceilings look higher. Though we wanted to replace the flooring throughout the apartment, our budget just couldn't handle it, so we decided to sand and stain the floors instead (a combination of jacobean and espresso). And when it comes to baseboards, the options are myriad!

But the hardest decision we had to make was our kitchen counters. I've always loved the look of white marble countertops with gray veining, but marble is known to be porous, and it easily stains. We cook a lot, so we needed something durable. We spent hours at marble yards checking out marble, granite, quartzite, and quartz but always came back to the marble. And once we picked out our specific slab, we had to work with the marble fabricator to determine where it should be cut for each part of the kitchen.

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