First, the good things. The apartment was clean. The kitchen was big enough to cook in and a couple people could eat a meal at the small table. The living room was spacious with a minimalist style – it had three sofas, a coffee table, and very small TV. The dining room sits six. There are only three bedrooms. I guess they count the living room as a bedroom for bed count. The place was comfortable for five adults (two couples and a single). We were grateful for the full-size refrigerator, gas range, dishwasher, plates, and cookware. We made bacon and eggs a couple times. There is a drip coffee maker, blender, and microwave.
We communicated with Aida, Nic’s mom, exclusively. Aida was very thorough with her texting (almost too much). She was very responsive to our texts, often answering within a couple minutes. This was good and bad because she typically expected an immediate response from us in return (if we didn’t respond immediately we often got additional texts).
The bad things. I thought were getting a house vice an apartment, but this a converted split level home so the owner lives below and the apartment is above. The listing title is a bit misleading because it says home, but it is classified as an apartment. We had an incident with the owner playing a movie loudly (lots of bass) after 10pm one night but a text to Aida resulted in the volume being turned down almost immediately. There are lots of rules. We joked that there were less rules to ride on the NYC subway (and the subway has lots of rules). If you don’t see the rules listed, make sure you contact the owners to view the rules before renting. There were other quirks: the cold and hot water were swapped in the master bath and the hot water was too hot so it was possible to scald yourself. We found out the hard way that steam from the hall bath will set off the fire alarm and result in a visit from the owner.
This was not our best VRBO experience but it did suit our needs for a place to lay our heads between our excursions to NYC and Madison, NJ. It was about a 20 minute drive to the Madison train station and a one hour train ride to Penn Station. There is a train station in Boonton, but it requires a transfer to get to Penn Station so it was faster for us to travel to Madison by car and go straight in. If you are just wanting to see NYC, I would pick something a little closer to one of the other train lines or splurge and stay in one of the boroughs.