Moving right along

I looked back into the archives of this site to see if I wrote up the story of purchasing our current house on Hicks Street. Barring some references in February 2002 it doesn't appear that I wrote up anything here.

The brief story: Lisa and I were both working for IBM. I was a flying consultant: I'd fly and sit in a room while my time was billed out at some insane hourly rate. I wasn't particularly thrilled with this job but it was nice to be working again. When I wasn't stuck in a windowless room in Columbus, OH, I was working from home.

Lisa, whose office at 55 Broad Street was temporarily closed due to a higher-than-normal presence of gypsum and petroleum products was also working frequently from home. At the time "home" was a 1 bedroom walkup on Cranberry Street. It was fine for one of us to work from home. A tad crowded for both of us to work from home (and imagine the fun of being on conference calls, even with two lines!).

So in August 2001 we started to look for a new place. I had fallen in love with Brooklyn Heights and never, ever wanted to leave. Our hunt took a brief vacation in September 2001 but picked up again in October.

By October I was commuting to Washington, DC once or twice a week (I did actual work on this gig, unlike the next one). One weekend we ran into the broker we'd been working with at an open house for a place we thought we'd like. Instead she told us to leave and check out another listing by someone else in her office. We were dogsitting Buster (a/k/a Boo), Oliver's adorable Roti, so I returned back to Cranberry to drop off Boo while Lisa went again to the prospective house.

While I was getting into the apartment, Lisa called and said You must come see this place. Now! (or words to that effect).

From the outside I wasn't impressed, it just looked like every other brownstone, however once I got inside I said Wow! and just kept saying Wow! as I walked through the place. I know I'm not alone in this reaction as I've heard it from several people. It's two and a half floors, with lots of light (amazing since it's seemingly surrounded by taller buildings).

• Lots of space.
• Space for two complete offices
• Outdoor deck
• Two and a half floors.

To cut the purchasing story short, since it's mostly irrelevant now: we made an offer and the purchase process went forward as I continued commuting to Columbus, OH. I was really unhappy to be spending four days in Columbus, getting paid only "straight" time, and furthermore getting only 50% billable credit since someone on the account team decided to screw the consultants in order to get the project. As a result, in the midst of purchasing a new home, I quit working for IBM and moved to a company called netomat (no, they don't get any link love). This resulted in no end of fun with the mortgage process (who said it wouldn't be a problem until at the closing they mentioned: you need to provide a paycheck or we don't close, and of course I hadn't been paid yet).

We moved in, finally, in March 2002 and threw our yearly Seder dinner seemingly the same week but I think we actually had a week in between moving and hosting a zillion people. We rewired the phones from the demarc in, put in cat-5e all over the place and generally made it a great place to work from home.

Frisket joined us in April and has grown up here, scampering around, teething a bit on the moulding, showing her mood by shifting from floor to floor during the day.

We've had a nice five years here, hosted many Seders, several parties, some overnight guests.

Of course things change: we moved because we were both working from home, but I was working in an office in midtown Manhattan for netomat before we even moved in. Lisa went through two separate cycles of working full-time at home. I quit working at netomat and have generally shuffled through a number of poorly thought out projects since then, never really returning to fulltime work. We now have two dogs.

Through it all we've tried to make this our home and generally succeeded except for one minor thing: the stairs. As those of you who've been here know, you need to go up a flight and a half of stairs to get to our "first" floor. From there it's another flight to the dining and kitchen area, and another flight to the den and deck (and Lisa's office).

And it's the stairs that made us decide now is a good time to move on. We each have minor issues with our legs which are not getting better and are unlikely to get better, but could easily get worse if, for example, one of us were to fall down the stairs. I'm not saying I did fall down the stairs, but when you have two dogs, stairs, leashes, and are frankly overweight and out of shape, well, stairs become an issue when you unintentionally impact them.

So about four weeks ago we resolved to look for a place that was on one floor, ideally in Brooklyn, but open to (gulp) moving to Manhattan. While we were at it we wanted a doorman, and a pony if possible. Ok, a doorman sufficed.

We found one place, in Manhattan, fell in love again, made an offer. I can't go into the details here, but we felt like the seller was screwing around with us and kept our eyes open.

Lisa found another place which I then rediscovered (having apparently rejected it out of hand earlier) at 1 Main Street in DUMBO. This is a factory/warehouse building which was converted into condos in the mid-1990s. It was one of the first conversions in DUMBO and (allegedly) served as the anchor for the renaissance of the neighborhood. It is about ½ mile from our current place, but it's in Brooklyn! which is all that really matters. Somehow returning to Manhattan seemed to be conceding defeat.

We're in contract, a zillion things could go wrong of course (including an attack of flying ninja cane-toads), but we hope to move in some time in June, putting our current place on the market at the end of this month.

The new place has a view of lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the eventually-they-will-build-it Brooklyn Bridge park.

Once things are further along I will post photos to my flickr page.