Katie Nielsen isn’t afraid of a challenge. When she moved into a builder-basic apartment in the Annex in 2021, she set to work turning the drab 430-square-foot space into a personality-packed home — on a student budget. An already small space she would eventually share with her fiancé.
Nielsen, who works as a speech pathologist for the Toronto District School Board, first came across her little apartment when she was in grad school at the University of Toronto and was looking for a place close to school. It looked like your typical Toronto rental unit: parquet wood floors, dark kitchen countertops and lots and lots of drab white walls.
“ Leaving it as is wasn’t really an option for me, but I also wanted it to be as cheap as possible,” says Nielsen. “It was my first time ever living alone, so I think I was just really excited to have my own space to decorate. I didn’t mind that it was not super nice. It was nice to just have a blank slate.”
With lots of pandemic time at home, it was the perfect opportunity to make a few creative, renter-friendly upgrades, hand-painting her kitchen floor to look like terracotta tiles, making her own TV stand out of wood and steel pipes and creating a bookshelf using Ikea dish racks.
With no prior DIY experience, Nielsen learned by spending a lot of time on Pinterest, watching YouTube tutorials, reading blog posts from other DIYers and getting woodworking help from her dad.
One of the first things she tackled was covering the kitchen counters in contact paper. “I’ve done that three times now. It’s super cheap to DIY — like less than $40. It has held up surprisingly well!” says Nielsen.
Nielsen began casually chronicling her projects on Instagram under the account @annex.apartment. At first, it was less about building an audience and more about documenting what she was learning in real time for her friends and family. But one video — of that DIY dish-rack bookshelf — went viral. It has since racked up 2.8 million views. “That was the thing that kind of blew up, and now I’m trying to take the Instagram account a little bit more seriously and post more videos of what I’m doing,” says Nielsen.
In the summer of 2024, six months into her relationship with her then-boyfriend, Liam Grubb, a graphic designer, he moved in. Squeezing two people into a junior one-bedroom meant some compromise, like giving Grubb half of the space in the bedroom closet, dresser and nightstands. Despite the tight footprint, living together has been relatively seamless.
“On days we both work from home, usually one of us will work at the desk and the other will work from the couch or kitchen island, then we swap halfway through the day,” says Nielsen. If they both need a desk, they’ll often work from a nearby coffee shop.
“We’re lucky that we’re each other’s best friends and we love spending time together,” Nielsen says, noting that they enjoy the same movies and TV shows, listen to the same music and have similar schedules.
Living together also became an opportunity to blend their tastes. One of the first joint purchases the couple made for the home was an original painting from Facebook Marketplace, which hangs in the living room. “I think those are the special pieces — the ones that are both of ours. It’s like the start of that chapter,” says Grubb.
Other details of their love story are sprinkled throughout the apartment: a receipt from the first coffee Grubb bought Nielsen, a print from Burdock Brewery, where they had their first date after matching on Hinge, and — most cherished of all — the green velvet couch in their living room, where Grubb proposed to Nielsen in December.
The couple is already looking ahead to their next chapter, which will include a bit more square footage. They hope to move to a larger place — ideally a home in Hamilton or Muskoka, where Nielsen grew up — in the next year or two.
The idea of transforming their next home is more inspiring than intimidating. “Wow! What a big project that would be,” says Grubb. “If Katie can do this for this small space, then the idea of getting a house is really exciting.”
