BrickUnderground

Photo Credit / Interior Marketing Group

You’re ready to put your apartment on the market. Now take a long, hard look. Is it ready to meet the public? Does it even know what to say to the public?

Ideally, according to stager Cheryl Eisen of Interior Marketing Group, your apartment should say “a stylish person with impeccable taste lives here."   Unfortunately, observes Eisen, "most homes I see that are not professionally staged look like Pottery Barn meets grandma’s hand-me-downs."

Note that staging is not the same thing as interior design, says Susan Goldstein, design director of Studio D.

“Interior design is geared to the homeowners taste and personal desire," says Goldstein, while "staging is about putting enough furniture in a space so that buyers can envision themselves living in the home and how their own furniture will fit in."

Photo Credit / Mr. T in DC

Scaffolding that’s a nuisance, a door that denies entry, and storage for the digital age! Six New York City citizens spill what they’d love to change about their homes.

• A place to store a suitcase: My husband travels a lot for work and we’ve used it as an excuse to keep his luggage parked in a corner of the apartment. But the truth is, it’s too much of a hassle to rearrange items in the closet to fit the suitcase back in there. The closets are so stuffed, as soon as you take something out, it’s like everything else in there pops into the empty space naturally.  - Marta, Upper West Side
• A scaffold-free existence: I can’t remember anymore when they put the damn scaffolding up around my building. It’s been years and years. It ruins the light, the view -- everything -- in my ground floor apartment. Plus, sometimes people play on it, or do their pull-ups like it’s a gym. It’s costing the building thousands of dollars. Last I heard, the scaffolding was still up because there was nobody to disassemble it. The scaffolding companies have a racket going on.  - Doris, Harlem

Brokelyn is a web mag founded in May 2009 about all things Brooklyn -- from hyper-local goings-on and stoop sales to cheap eats and real estate deal. The content is written by contributors who live and work all over Brooklyn. 

Since starting in 2009, the blog has exploded. We got a chance to hear from one of the site’s editors, Dave Colon, who started as a contributor and is now the News Editor of Brokelyn. Dave is originally from Long Beach, and has been a resident of Bushwick for 5 years. 

Although Brokelyn covers all Brooklyn news in a broader sense, Colon was able to narrow the scope to his neighborhood: Bushwick.

Photo Credit / Marv Gillibrand

My first Brooklyn apartment was a walkup in Midwood so cramped that a single renter would have felt smothered. Unfortunately, I had three roommates to contend with. My friend, Lindsay, and I lived on top of one another in a ten-by-ten room, while Arthur and Lula, a couple we barely knew, shared the bedroom next to ours.

At first, I survived the claustrophobia by taking solace in the fact that our apartment couldn’t possibly get any more crowded. How naive I was. 

One morning, I walked out of my bedroom to find a man sleeping on our kitchen table. He was snoring and shirtless. After jumping three feet in the air and muffling a scream, I tiptoed closer to assess the situation. He had a stack of suitcases on the floor beside him and his coat was hanging off our pan rack.