Welcome to the inaugural post of Aly’s Apartment. Really, it should be called Aly and Hanno’s Apartment…but that’s too much of a mouthful, so with Hanno’s approval – here we go!
Hanno and I moved to Berlin in September of 2017, after a whirlwind of a City Hall wedding in NYC. We came to the city due to Hanno’s American visa expiring, and arrived here with not much planned out. I knew very little German and neither of us had jobs yet. Thankfully 6 months later Hanno has found a job and I am well on my way to speaking German! Unfortunately, the job market has been tough here for me, due to said lack of German.
Despite this, we were able to find an apartment in one of the most difficult housing markets I think I’ve ever experienced. Basically the only way to get an apartment here is to inherit one, have a connection with someone in a building with a vacancy, have a ton of money, or get extremely, extremely lucky. Our case falls into the latter – as we actually found our apartment online and just happened to be the first to respond. Might I add that this ad was literally online for such a short period of time that by the time Hanno told me about it, the link was already dead….that’s Berlin for you.
So – here we are, finally moving in to our beautiful new apartment! We ended up in Charlottenburg, which was not our first choice of neighborhoods. With this market, you have to be open and we stumbled across a bright and big apartment in this adorable neighborhood. Also, Charlottenburg was a hip place about 30 years ago and I’m on a mission to bring it back! There’s still tons to do over here and hopefully I’ll post a few things about our amazing new neighborhood as I discover them.
As the job hunt is difficult and frustrating, and learning German is exhausting, I needed a little something fun to pass the time. Enter: Aly’s Apartment! Since we moved to Berlin with only a few boxes of stuff and no furniture, we have the opportunity to furnish and decorate an entire apartment from scratch! So, I’ve decided to document the adventure through this blog. It’ll be a while before the place really starts coming together, but we have so many fun ideas and plans – I can’t wait to share them!
Hopefully, whoever is reading this will find this blog semi-interesting, informative and maybe inspire you to try something in your own home! I’d also love to connect with other interior creative types and source some ideas from you!
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