Space 900 square feet | Rent $600
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It took Michelle Puetz a month to move into her fourth-floor walk-up in 2002. She was living across the street, with a guy who was by then her ex-boyfriend, and ferried her belongings up the steep, uneven stairs one day at a time. The new apartment was a mess: there’d been one previous tenant, but before that it had been used for storage. The door was cut for hobbits, just five-and-a-half-feet high, and inside the sloped ceiling was barely eight feet at its peak–Puetz had to take a six-by-six painting (by her friend Jaya Howey) off its stretchers to get it into the place. The wall between the kitchen and bedroom was only framed out; lighting consisted of three box fluorescents. Some of the floorboards had rotted away and the kitchen floor was covered with tar paper. Worse, “the tar had started to soak through the paper, so it was really sticky.”
She took down the fluorescents, wired and installed new fixtures over the bed, knocked out a wall separating the sleeping and living areas, drywalled the studs between the bedroom and kitchen, and mounted a mirror and cabinet in the tiny bathroom, which has a shower stall but no tub. She painted the walls “circus colors”: red, dark purple, bright blue, bubble-gum pink, chartreuse. A seasoned thrift shopper, she scavenged a lot of the furnishings and fixtures. The red metal kitchen cabinets came from the alley; she bought her mod lamp shades “off a guy in the neighborhood who used to go around and sell stuff he found in the trash.”
