House Hunting

I have been meaning to start this blog for a while now. Due to time constraints, lack of creativity, and overall just life interference, there was an inevitable delay. However, I'm happy to start posting now. I'll post a few entries at once to catch up to where I was with the blog "offline", but as we go forward, the blog will track our progress with our experience as first-time home-buyers and renovators.

Roughly two years ago, we began a common stage in many people’s lives: we started to look for a home to purchase and call our own. In many parts of the country, this is a rather straightforward ordeal. You visit a handful of homes, you narrow it down, and voila, you move in. For us on the other hand, this was a huge undertaking.

Living in NYC, there was little in our price range that matched exactly what we were looking for. We weren’t even picky: condo, co-op, townhome, brownstone, you name it. All were in our radar. The issue was space. We really wanted space, and maybe even a little bit of green space, and that is a very expensive commodity in this city.

Many outside of the city would be shocked at what people are willing to pay here, but that is a different conversation. For us it was set – we were New Yorkers, and we were going to stay in New York. We had never owned anything (not even a car) and this was an important next step for us.

During the course of two years, possibly one hundred open houses in various neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and many questionable statements made by real estate agents, we realized something: we weren’t going to be happy in new construction, or even someone else’s recent renovations. Not for the price.

We ultimately decided that a “fixer-upper” was the way to go. Why pay the premium for someone else’s new design and detailing when you could design your own? After all, we were in no rush to move in (the perks of a rent-controlled apartment) and could take our time making something truly our own.

However, even finding a fixer-upper was no easy task! Once again, it was amazing what people were willing to pay. Understandably, re-doing many of these properties would reward you with a beautiful home or fine investment, but we simply did not have the cash-flow that many of these places required. Finally the insistent search paid off and we find our house. We did make other offers along the way but this was the one: a two-family configured, 1910-built, modest home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn that we envisioned as our single-family, “high-end” home. It even had a backyard!

Finding the house was just the beginning….