Bashel Lubarsky was told she had just over 100 days to leave the Brooklyn apartment she thought she’d call home for years, resulting in a tearful video tour

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For three years, Bashel Lubarsky thought she and her fiancé, Daniel Berk, had more time in the Brooklyn apartment where they built their first home together, hosted friends around a set of $10 dining chairs and got used to luxuries like a backyard and in-unit laundry. Then, on July 20, an unexpected phone call told them they would have to be out by Nov. 1.

“I had found out an hour prior that we were losing our home, so I was a bit emotional, if you can understand,” Lubarsky, 27, tells PEOPLE of the viral apartment tour video. After sitting silently on the couch with Berk, 29, she turned to him mid-cry and asked, “Should we make a video right now?”

The result was an emotional Instagram tour of the apartment Lubarsky had long wanted to share, only now she was walking viewers through it while confronting the possibility of losing everything she loved about it. She pointed out the elevator they rarely used, the dishwasher, the backyard, her office and closet and the furniture she feared might never fit into another New York City apartment.The couple had landed the apartment without ever having to search for it themselves. Lubarsky’s brother and sister-in-law, Abby, found it after moving from San Francisco to New York during the COVID pandemic, then lived there for about two years before deciding they needed more room after having their daughter, Mila.

When they moved out, Lubarsky and Berk were ready to move in together, and the landlords allowed them to take over the apartment at its COVID-era rent. “We loved their apartment so much, from the large windows and the incredible location, and the backyard with a BBQ and plenty of room for activities,” Lubarsky says.

Today, the couple split the $3,400 monthly rent, a deal Lubarsky says they didn’t fully appreciate until they began looking at what else was available. Based on what she has seen so far, she believes a comparable apartment would cost at least $4,000 per month.

The call in July wasn’t the result of a contentious relationship with their landlords, either. Lubarsky says the owners had moved to Mexico City about six months earlier but now need to return to New York because of a family situation, and since her lease is the next to expire, they plan to move into her unit.

Lubarsky says the landlords gave the couple a little more than 100 days’ notice and even offered to help them search for a new place. “They’ve been calling us ‘the kiddos’ since we moved in and have been nothing but kind and wonderful landlords since the beginning,” she says.

What made the news especially painful was how much of the couple’s life had accumulated inside the apartment, often through Facebook Marketplace finds Lubarsky hunted down herself. Among them are six green velvet dining chairs she bought for just $10 each and drove to Long Island with her dad to pick up.

The chairs, she admits, are uncomfortable, stain easily and have begun falling apart, but replacing them isn’t quite as simple as finding a better set. “The butts of all of our loved ones sat in these awful $10 chairs,” she says, recalling dinners, board game nights that stretched until 3 a.m. and stories that left everyone laughing.

For now, Lubarsky and Berk have barely begun their apartment hunt because listings for Nov. 1 aren’t readily available yet, but they are hoping for two bedrooms, a dishwasher and laundry at least somewhere in the building. The backyard may be harder to replicate, though Lubarsky is determined not to assume they have to settle before the search truly begins.

She also no longer plans to immediately unload the furniture she panicked about losing in her Instagram, saying nothing is “on the chopping block” until they know where they’re going. More than anything, the move has made her think about what the apartment represents as she and Berk prepare to get married and start another chapter together.

“This was always going to be the place that we drive by with our kids one day and point out of the car window and say, ‘That was our first apartment together,’ ” Lubarsky says. “We thought we had a few more years here, yes,” she adds, but wherever they land next, she hopes it has enough room for the friends, family, food and laughter that made this apartment feel like home in the first place.