My New York Apartment Costs £1,500 A Month—Here's How Big It Is

In Refinery29's Sweet Digs, we take a look inside the sometimes small, sometimes spacious homes of millennial city dwellers. Today, 25-year-old Melina Peterson shows us around her crooked studio in Greenwich Village.

If you didn't grow up in New York City, moving to Manhattan might come as a shock. Sure, there are the crowds and the trash on the sidewalk, the rats and the cockroaches, but the first thing to get used to? The prices, the rent — and the brokers.

"Finding my apartment was an adventure," Los Angeles transplant Melina Peterson says. "My broker was another California girl, and we both bonded over that fact. On the first day showing me apartments, she rented a car — and she did not seem to know how to drive in Manhattan."

Several wrong turns later (and after going down a one-way street the wrong way), Peterson was shown several places in the East Village that didn't match what she wanted. And even worse? Her broker got a ticket from parking illegally. "She said, 'Well, it'll be worth it if you end up renting a place from me,'" Melina says. "She was using it to guilt me, and it was my third day in the city. I was so overwhelmed."

Naturally, Melina did not go with that broker, and instead found her tiny little studio on Nakedapartments.com. The studio, approximately 300 square feet, had slanted floors and a weirdly-positioned shower, but it also had great light and grandiose archways separating the bedroom area from the living space. Click ahead to see Melina's sweet digs and shop some of her picks.