Welcome Home! Our Yaletown, Vancouver Apartment Tour

Welcome home! Or, more accurately, welcome to the tour of our home – our rental apartment in Yaletown, Vancouver. We moved into this one bedroom apartment in November 2021 and have been sprucing it up ever since.

This isn’t turning into an interior design or home decor blog (I wish I had that kind of talent!), but I’m excited to share this slice of our life with you. I think we did a pretty good job (if I do say so myself!) finding this awesome apartment, sourcing goods from thrift stores and the secondhand market, and designing our home on a budget.

Our Vancouver apartment & Yaletown neighbourhood

As mentioned, our apartment is a one bedroom, one bathroom unit in a high-rise condo building in Vancouver’s Yaletown district. It’s about 850 square feet, which is ginormous by Vancouver standards. It also has an enclosed private patio of almost 500 square feet – which means the patio alone is bigger than a few of our past apartments!

We are loving living in Yaletown. We’re right across the street from a huge park that’s on the water (meaning we walk Ellie on the Seawall every day!), Colin is a 15 minute walk from work, and my mom is just a 10 minute walk away. We also have lots of restaurants, shops and transit connections right on our doorstep.

Yaletown is thought of as a bit of a “yuppie” neighbourhood in Vancouver, but I do think that’s changing. When looking at apartments, we didn’t find the rental prices in Yaletown to be much different from the rest of downtown Vancouver. That’s not to say it’s cheap – everywhere in Vancouver is expensive. And while I do miss the neighbourhood and beaches of where we used to live in the West End, I’m really enjoying getting to know Yaletown.

Entryway

I love that this apartment actually has an entryway! So many condos open up right into a living/dining room with no space for coats or shoes. It’s nice having all this space, especially when we have Ellie, bags, umbrellas, etc.

When we arrived, the previous tenants had left us a big shoe rack/clothing rack combo, but it didn’t fit well into this closet. So instead, I sold that on Facebook Marketplace and picked up a longer shoe rack that did actually fit. So basically by getting this new shoe rack, I made $15!

Our coat closet is quite deep, which allows us to keep a row of shoes on the floor in front of the shoe rack. This might not seem all that significant, but it’s actually been a really nice feature. At our old place, if you wanted to put your shoes in the closet, you had to put them on the shoe rack. And since we’re lazy, we often just let a few pairs of shoes pile up on the entryway mat, crowding the front door. But here, we can still be lazy and leave our shoes on the ground, while hiding them all away in the closed closet!

The other closet hides our in-suite washer and dryer!

Storage

We weren’t looking for an apartment with a storage unit but I am so happy this apartment comes with one. And even more thrilled that it is in-suite! We’ve made great use of this space and store everything in here: reusable bags, toilet paper, tools, cleaning supplies, a crock pot, two air conditioners, a tent, all of Colin’s sports equipment, a billion tissue boxes, a vacuum and a giant bag of flour, just to name a few.

Originally, I wanted us to install shelves and go all Home Edit on this storage unit, but we’ve done a good makeshift job with a few standing shelves. We had one of the metal shelving units in our old house (bought from Walmart 5 years ago), the other unit was left behind for us by the previous tenants, and I picked up a few baskets off Facebook Marketplace for about $5/basket.

Bathroom

Across from the storage closet is our bathroom. This was the first room we “finished” and mostly because we picked up everything at Homesense the day we got our keys. I love the fabric shower curtain (so much nicer than a plastic one!), and the light blues and subtle yellow pops throughout. I also really like the little vase on the countertop that I bought off Marketplace – it’s just small enough to be cute and not in the way!

We have the most powerful shower head ever, which is not something you hear often in a rental apartment. But seriously, the water pressure is so strong that on my first time using it, the shower head flew backward and sprayed water all over the bathroom. We also have a soaker tub, that we haven’t taken advantage of yet. But one of these days I’m going to have a bubble bath!

Kitchen

If there is one room in the apartment we’re not totally in love with, it’s probably the kitchen. It’s a little on the small side, and definitely feels cramped with two people in there. We’re also not a fan of the ‘push to open’ cabinetry – you have to push very hard to close anything and we end up accidentally opening a cabinet or drawer anytime we lean on the counter.

But it’s not a bad kitchen by any means! We have plenty of room for all of our stuff and have no complaints about any of the appliances (except for when the dishwasher broke and it took forever to get a replacement… but we have a new one now that works great!). It’s just not the most inspiring place to bake a tray of lemon squares, you know?

Speaking of stuff, the kitchen was one of the most fun areas for us to unpack because we were reunited with all of our old kitchen stuff. When we moved to Prague in June 2019, we sold some of our stuff, left some behind at the condo we rented out, and put some in storage. We ended up putting all of our kitchen stuff in storage as our tenants didn’t want it and we didn’t want to start from scratch when we came back. But when we did come back to Canada in March 2020, we moved into a furnished apartment with a fully stocked kitchen, and so left our kitchen stuff in storage.

And now, two and a half years later, we’ve finally been reunited with our kitchen stuff! It’s been great having all of our dishware and cutlery, and wondering why we saved certain things and forgot others (for some reason we only have a 1 cup and a 1/3 cup – what happened to the 1/2 and 1/4?). We were also reunited with our collection of travel magnets and finally have a magnetic fridge to put them on!

Everything else we thrifted, bought secondhand or bought cheap, including:

• A kettle, dish towels, oven mitts, wok and glass baking dish from Homesense
• A kitchen mat, garbage can and pot from Amazon
• A huge bamboo cutlery holder (only $8) and paper towel holder (only $1!) from Wild Life Thrift
• And free cutlery, dishware and a blender from our Buy Nothing group on Facebook!

Dining

As you can tell, the main living space in our Yaletown apartment is a dining/living/office combination. But for the sake of this house tour, I’ll break them up into their own categories.

We bought the dining table off of the previous tenants for only $40, which was a steal and also saved us the hassle of having to move a dining table into the apartment. It’s small, and we don’t use it very often, but it’s nice to have.

I searched long and hard for affordable dining chairs I liked (these are my fave but they’re so pricy!) but came up short. And so, we got these as temporary chairs. The best part? They were free! A local restaurant was redecorating and giving away their old chairs for free. But when we came to pick up the chairs, the restaurant was still open with a room full of diners. And yet they still insisted we take the chairs. And so, Colin and I awkwardly went around the restaurant to find four free chairs and walked out with them while all the patrons stared at us!

On the opposite wall is a console table we bought off Amazon. We searched far and wide for a console table that would be long and skinny enough for this little nook, without costing an arm and a leg. We actually had ordered another one from Amazon, but they cancelled the order, forcing us to start the search again. So we settled for this one, which still took a very long time to arrive, but it’s working just fine.

I bought this teal vase and some of the fake flowers off Facebook Marketplace and it was actually one of the first things we brought to our new house. I also added my dried wedding bouquet to this vase, which I think makes it so much more personal – and pretty!

We also have Ellie’s food and water bowls by the dining table, in a new little stand that Colin bought her from Homesense. Even Ellie gets new things in our new house!

Living room

This is the area where you’ll find us almost every night, curled up with pillows, blankets and Ellie, watching whatever show we’re addicted to at the moment.

We bought the TV stand/console off the previous tenants, which was another big savings and made our moving day a lot easier. Plus, it’s exactly the style we would have gone for if we were buying one ourselves. The TV was bought off Facebook Marketplace. Colin found a great deal and we now have a Smart TV, which makes Netflix and Amazon Prime binges a little easier.

The couch saga

This is actually the fourth couch we had for this apartment. And let me tell you, it was a STRUGGLE to get this bad boy! We bought our first couch from a furniture store my mom has used and loved. We got a great deal on it, under $800, and bought it a month before our move-in date, since we know furniture shipments can take a while. We set a delivery date and figured we were all set to go!

But when I called them to confirm the delivery (and thank goodness I did!), they had no idea who we were. After some back and forth, they found our order, but couldn’t find our couch. They didn’t have the colour or style we had ordered. My mom got on the phone with them and managed to get us a good deal on a similar model. Colin went in to the store to try it out, gave it his stamp of approval, and paid the difference for couch #2.

The couch arrived on our move-in day and Colin put it together that night. Unfortunately, one of the legs broke off only a few hours later. We spoke with the store (again, my mom was a great champion for us!) and they insisted we must have put it together wrong. But there was only one way to screw in the legs. We decided it was just a poorly constructed couch and we weren’t comfortable buying a new one from them. So after a lot of back and forth, they agreed to pick up the couch and refund our money.

Colin and I spent a long time trying to find a couch that was affordable and could be delivered ASAP. As anyone who has tried to order furniture in the last year can attest to, affordable and available is very hard to find! While we searched, we sat on the floor or our computer chairs, since at this point we didn’t have dining room chairs either.

We did eventually find a couch that was an acceptable price (but way more than the original $800 couch we had bought) and available online. We went out to the store to see it, but they didn’t have it in stock. Instead, they showed us a fabric sample and had us sit on similar styles. Even though we didn’t have a great feel for couch #3, we decided to go for it. We even agreed to the $300 shipping fee and a delivery date that was six weeks out.

Not wanting to sit on the floor until Christmas, I once again turned to Facebook Marketplace. I figured we could find some cheap chairs as a temporary solution until our couch arrived. It just so happened that someone who lived just four blocks away was getting rid of her IKEA couch for $150. We got in touch and I convinced Colin we should go out that night (since it wasn’t raining) to pick up couch #4.

As I detailed in my month in review, the actual moving of the couch was quite the feat. We definitely could’ve used a truck, or three more people. But after a lot of huffing and puffing, and strange looks from our neighbours, we got the couch home. Colin assembled it and we both sat down in exhaustion. And who would’ve thought? It was actually pretty comfortable! In fact, it was so comfortable that we decided our temporary $150 used IKEA couch would become our new permanent couch…at least for a while.

The next morning I called the other furniture company to cancel couch #3. It took a while to reach someone who would help but eventually, the order was cancelled and our money was refunded. And now, after all that, we finally have our couch!

Other awesome living room finds include:

• Pillows from Homesense that Ellie is determined to rip apart
• A beautiful jute rug that I’m in love with from Rugs USA
• An adorable pouff that I got off Marketplace for just $35!
• A TV tray from Wild Life Thrift for $12 (that just so happened to match the other TV tray we already had)
• A smaller tray and some decor items from our Buy Nothing group
• And a lovely white knit blanket we got for Christmas from my mother-in-law

Office

My favourite part of the house is my little office corner. It’s sectioned off from the rest of the living space, while still being a part of the open concept room. I love that two of my walls are windows, making my space feel so bright, light and open. I love that I have a beautiful bookshelf and great view of the Christmas tree. And I really love that my office is no longer in the bedroom!

Most of my office essentials (desk, chair, laptop) came with us from our old house. But I’ve picked up a few new things too. I found this bookshelf on Amazon which Colin put together for me. It was so hard to find a shelf under $150 that was tall but not too wide, to perfectly fit into this corner. I loved decorating this shelf and filling it with all of my stationary, books, craft supplies and a few decor items. With everything on the bookshelf or desk, the rest of the space can stay open so none of the light from the windows is blocked.

The picture ledges to the right of my office space are another favourite of mine, though getting them home was a mission. They are very heavy and I stupidly thought we needed six (we’re only using two) and decided to pick them up in East Van, carrying them for blocks and blocks in the rain. But they were cheap – less than $7/ledge! And I do love how these two look with our picture frames (most of which we owned already and some I picked up at Wild Life Thrift).

The last thing I got for this space was a little plant on my desk, which actually came together from a few different sources: I got a free cutting from someone in our Buy Nothing group, bought a $5 succulent from the grocery store, thrifted the pot for $4, and took some soil from our patio to put it all together!

Plant update: Sadly, while we were away in Toronto for Christmas, this little guy didn’t make it. I forgot to tell our pet sitters to water it and I think it may have been too cold. Will have to try again!

Bedroom

Another awesome aspect of this apartment is how large the bedroom is! Most downtown apartments have very small bedrooms, with barely enough space for a queen bed and the ability to walk around it. We decided to upgrade to a king and still have plenty of space. We joke that with a king bed and awesome water pressure in our shower, we never need to stay at a hotel again!

We bought our mattress off Wayfair for about $700. They did have cheaper ones, but we wanted our mattress to be a little bit thicker. We didn’t want to spend thousands on the fancy mattresses you see on TV (or Instagram ads) and didn’t want a secondhand mattress, so Wayfair was a good middle ground. We actually had the mattress shipped to my mom’s place ahead of time so we’d definitely have it on our first night in the apartment. It worked out, in that we did have a place to sleep on night one, but was also a pain as it meant we had to move a 100+lb mattress by ourselves (and so did my mom when she received the delivery!).

The bed frame was a great find on Facebook Marketplace. I believe we only paid $110 for it and arranged to pick it up on our moving day, since we already had the Uhaul rented. It took us a while to find one we liked in our price range, so we really lucked out getting this one. The bedside tables were also from Facebook Marketplace.

The lamps, both bedside and standing, are all from Amazon and were quite affordable ($25 for each bedside lamp, $100 for the standing lamp). I actually ended up missing the Amazon delivery (via Purolator) for the standing lamp and had to trek across the peninsula to pick it up. But luckily, it wasn’t too heavy!

Having this much closet space has been a big change for us. At our last place, Colin and I shared about half a closet and three drawers. So to have multiple closets to ourselves has been wild. In fact, we’re barely using them – a lot of the shelves are empty! We did buy a few baskets from Marketplace and a set of hangers off Amazon to help keep our closets organized.

We weren’t planning to get a rug for the bedroom, because to get one large enough to fit under the bed would have been really expensive. But we decided to get rugs on either side of the bed, not for comfort or aesthetics, but for Ellie. Ellie sleeps with us but struggles to jump up on the bed because she’s so small. But with a carpet, she can get enough traction to run and leap (mostly right on top of us!). We got one rug from Rugs USA and the other was free from our Yaletown Buy Nothing group. Oddly enough, I think we like the free one better!

Colin’s office

 

We then have Colin’s office nook in the back corner of our bedroom. In our old place, I had my office in the bedroom and Colin had his in the living room. We switched at this place, and I think we’re both happier about it. Since I work from home, it makes sense for me to have the bigger space. And I really like having the separation between my work space and my sleep space. And because Colin plays online games, it’s nice for him to be able to go into the bedroom and close the door, instead of taking over all the living space.

I like that Colin has his own space for his computer and all his hobbies. And it’s nice that this office nook feels separate from our sleeping space, and has a window for some natural light. His shelf (from Wayfair) just arrived so Colin is still figuring out where he wants everything.

Outside

It’s such a privilege to have an outdoor space in a Vancouver apartment, let alone one that’s actually worth writing about. At our last apartment, we had a small balcony and it was so nice to eat outdoors in the summer, barbecue meals, and just sit out there to read or do work. I can’t wait until we can use our huge patio here when the weather gets better!

The previous tenants left us an outdoor dining table and chairs, two umbrellas, an outdoor storage box, and an assortment of live and dead plants. So far, we haven’t done much out here, besides put our barbecue into the storage box. I’ve tried to rescue some of the plants, and have added in a few more I got from our Buy Nothing group, but I don’t have high hopes for my green thumb.

Come summer, we hope to have the patio all spruced up so we can spend a lot of time out there. We want to get a set of lounge furniture for the empty corner. We’re hoping to find a sectional, coffee table, and one or two chairs for an affordable price. We’ll set up the barbecue and make sure Colin has everything he needs to become a proper grill master. And we want to put up bistro lights so we can use the patio into the evening. I’m already envisioning summer salads and barbecue chicken burgers at the table, and sipping on beer while chatting with friends in the lounge area.

We’ve also talked about adding a fire pit, corn hole and maybe a small faux grass patch for Ellie, but we’ll have to see. I’d also like to get better at gardening and actually plant some stuff out there, since we have the space. All to say, this giant patio has a ton of potential and we definitely don’t want to waste our opportunity to make the most of it.

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And that is our home! What do you think of our space? 

 

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